Niantic Labs
Augmented reality software development
- 501-1000 employees
- B2C
- Gaming
- Augmented Reality
- SaaS
- Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA
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Company mission
To use emerging augmented reality (AR) technology to enrich our experiences as human being in the physical world.
-14% employee growth in 12 months
Our take
Niantic Labs is a software development company creating augmented reality mobile games, such as Monster Hunter Now, Pikmin Bloom, and Pokémon GO, that encourage players to go outside, explore, and meet people. The company was formed in 2010 as an internal startup within Google. Since its inception, hundreds of millions of people have used its products and services.
Although Niantic made a name for itself in the mobile gaming industry through the success of Pokémon Go, the company is hoping to become a platform for other developers to build location-aware AR apps on top of. In 2022, it released a location mapping software for AR, allowing AR experiences to be grounded to a physical location, like the front of a building or a park monument, rather than just floating aimlessly through a phone’s camera view.
Niantic plans to use this platform for an AR-based metaverse, an alternative to Meta’s plans for a VR-based metaverse that renders us bound to VR headsets. The company believes that an AR metaverse on a 3D map of the world will play a critical role in the next transition in computing, and raised funds to make this vision a reality in 2021.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Benefits
- Fertility benefits with Carrot
- 100% of premiums for long-term and short-term disability and life insurance
- Parental leave transition assistance by Maven
- Robust medical, dental, and vision insurance including 100% paid employee healthcare
- Mental healthcare access by Spring Health and EAP
- Increasing paid time off with tenure
- Five flex days per year to attend Niantic community events or volunteer
- Company-wide shutdown between Christmas and New Year
- 401(k) match
- Equity options
- Commuter benefits and subsidization: To allow you to set aside money every month for both parking and transportation
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave
- Compare and refinance loans with Credible’s online loan marketplace
- Donation Matching: Niantic gives enables employee donation matching and volunteer opportunities. Each employees can request a Niantic match of up to $500 per employee, each year.
- Legal Services and Identity Theft: ARAG’s legal services provide protection for many legal matters incurred by you, your spouse, or your children.
- Wellness Reimbursement: We build our platform and games to give our players even more reasons to get outside, explore the world, and lead more active lifestyles, so we offer monthly gym, internet, and cell phone reimbursements to help our teams do just that.
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Nov 2021
$300m
SERIES D
Dec 2018
$245m
SERIES C
Total funding: $774.3m
This company has top investors
Leadership
John Hanke
(CEO)Having studied for an MBA at UCB, John worked as a Producer for 3DO before co-founding Big Network and Keyhole. He then spent over 11 years at Google as VP of Product, before leaving in October 2015 to found Niantic.