Apple Acquired C3 Technologies for $267m

Apple is reported to have acquired Swedish 3D City model provider C3 Technologies for $267 million.

C3 Technologies provides detailed 3D city models for the web mapping industry. C3 Technologie used a proprietary computer vision technology that deliver quick and cheap 3D images of cities. The company was flying a fleet of 7 planes over the largest cities in the world with oblique cameras systems.

C3 computer vistion algorithms were comparing two different oblique images of the same area to produce the height value. In comparison other 3D Cities vendors use oblique images plus a LIDAR-enabled plane.

Swedish defense and security vendor Saab AB was the main shareholder of C3 Technologies which used the computer vision technology it developed for fast 3D mapping of battlegrounds. The company revealed in a filing that it sold its 57.8 percent shares of C3 Technologies to an unknown party for $154 million (MSEK 1,007) in a transaction closed in the third quarter.

9to5Mac revealed last week that the C3 Technologies team is now working for Apple after their website and commercial acitvity was shutdown.

C3 Technologies had a staff of 35 people and customers were Yell.com in the UK and several yellow pages companies in the Nordics. Nokia also become a customer of C3 Technologies for Nokia Maps this year (read more here).

This is the third mapping-related company bought by Apple in the last two years, but the largest one. Previous acquisitions: Placebase and Poly9 were very small shops, talents acquisitions rather than technology-centric as this one.