Amadeus Ventures Invests in Situm, an ‘Indoor GPS’ Startup for Travelers at Airports, Train Stations or Conference Centres
We are all familiar with arriving in a foreign airport, a huge conference centre complex or busy international train station and feeling lost. Signage doesn’t always help, there’s no one available to ask for help and it’s difficult to spot knowledgeable locals.
Until now, indoor navigation– or “GPS for indoors” – was limited to physical signs, people and large format maps. No longer. With Situm, we can all benefit from our very own personal navigation assistant, on our smartphone or tablet device. So, whether we want to get to the departure gate on time, quickly find the panel session we’re speaking at, or catch that last-minute train, we can do so in the knowledge we won’t get lost along the way.
The Spanish startup provides indoor positioning, tracking and navigation services for many different uses. For example, it can guide visitors inside a large building, track the location of security staff in case of emergencies, or track moving objects inside factories. Situm is the latest startup to benefit from investment by Amadeus Ventures. Thousands of buildings around the world have already used its technology, which provides high location accuracy, up to 1 metre, with the lowest infrastructure investment and complexity for indoor services.
Situm’s indoor positioning system (IPS) applies a unique location algorithm, able to use all available sensors in smartphones collaboratively (e.g. Wi-Fi, magnetometer, Bluetooth Low Energy and user movement prediction based on inertial sensors). Global navigation satellite systems (GPS ) often don’t work indoors because the microwaves that GPS uses to identify locations are reduced and scattered by roofs, walls and other objects.
“When travelling, we often find ourselves in new places and unfamiliar surroundings, which can be daunting. By delivering a minimal-infrastructure solution, and harnessing the power of personal mobile technology, we can quickly give travellers reassurance that they can always get to where they need to be” said Víctor Alvarez, CEO and founder of Situm Technologies.
Travellers can download an application using Situm’s indoor GPS to navigate around an airport, train station, museum or gallery. For managers of airports, train stations, conferences or hotels, Situm allows real-time viewing of the staff movements, facilitates better allocation of resources to smooth passenger flow, improves security services, and offers better analytics to improve geo-marketing and targeting.
“Improving operations and performance across all parts of the travel sector is a key area of focus for us at Amadeus. By working together with our own teams, developers and startups, we are focused on developing new ways to relieve the tensions that exist for all of us when travelling. Situm offers a really powerful solution and we look forward to having it as part of our investment portfolio and working together to solve some of these challenges,” said Katherine Grass, head of Amadeus Innovation and Ventures.
Amadeus Ventures has co-invested in Situm with Unirisco and Xesgalicia. Amadeus Ventures the corporate venture arm of Amadeus IT group, is a travel venture program which invests in start-ups sitting at the crossroads of travel and technology. Amadeus launched this initiative in 2014 and Situm is the latest addition to a portfolio that also includes start-ups such as Avuxi, Betterez, Bluesmart, BookingPal, Flyr and Yapta. Amadeus Ventures also invested in Cabify and successfully exited from its investment in 2015
