Ege Akpinar

Today Ege Akpinar runs Pointr, the indoor-location company whose platform, Deep Location, does the thing satellites can't: it tracks you accurately inside the world's largest and most confusing buildings. Airports. Hospitals. Convention centers the size of small towns. The product is the blue dot you take for granted outdoors, smuggled past the front door and made to work where GPS signal dies.

The current obsession is speed. Mapping a giant venue used to be slow, manual, and expensive - someone tracing corridors and labeling rooms for days. Pointr built an AI mapping engine that compresses that work into minutes. At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, the company powered wayfinding across 14 venues and roughly 7 million square feet, helping attendees find 4,500-plus exhibitors through the show's official app. Pointr calls it the largest indoor location experience ever delivered for an event. Hard to argue.

Pointr's tech doesn't demand that you bolt proprietary hardware to every wall. It can ride on existing WiFi access points or smart lighting, fuse those signals with Bluetooth beacons and phone sensors, and squeeze out 1-3 meter accuracy. That practicality is why the partner list reads like an infrastructure who's who - Cisco, CBRE, Siemens - and why 14 Fortune 100 companies trust it inside their buildings.

None of this was the plan. In 2013, Ege was a software and digital strategy consultant in London, taking on clients like Tesco and Harrods. Harrods wanted something specific and slightly absurd: give shoppers GPS-style guidance inside the flagship store. He built the prototype. The favor became a fixation.

He founded the company that November and called it Indoorz. Co-founders Axel Katalan, Chris Charles and Can Akpinar joined in early 2014. Katalan, met through a mutual friend, first pitched a gaming app; Ege steered the partnership toward unglamorous, durable B2B software instead. Then a client asked whether the system could work outdoors too. That single question rebranded the company. Indoorz became Pointr in November 2014.

The early years were a startup's greatest-hits reel of accelerators and awards. Angel funding in 2015. A spot in the Microsoft Ventures accelerator near Liverpool Street. Support from Level39 in Canary Wharf, where Pointr installed its own tech so colleagues could find each other and newcomers could find the building. A Mobile Innovation of the Year award with Gatwick Airport. A Drapers Digital Award with the very client that started it all, Harrods. TechCrunch named Pointr one of Europe's hottest IoT companies.

The credentials underneath are unusually deep for a founder in this corner of software. Ege earned a BS in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul, spent time as an exchange student at Boston University studying computer engineering and, of all things, music, sat as a special student in artificial intelligence at MIT before AI became every pitch deck's favorite noun, and finished with an MRes in Advanced Computing from Imperial College London in 2012. He also carries research experience tied to MIT and Harvard Medical School.

Put plainly: he was trained to think about hard signal problems, then spent a decade pointing that training at one stubborn one. The result is a category that barely existed when he started and now sits quietly inside the buildings you move through - the airport you sprint through to make a connection, the hospital wing where a wrong turn costs you your appointment slot, the trade show floor where 4,500 booths blur into one.

The co-founding team mattered to how the company grew. Can Akpinar, Axel Katalan and Chris Charles came aboard in 2014, turning a one-person prototype into a product team that could ship across both Android and iOS in the same breath. The earliest version leaned on iBeacons - the Bluetooth Low Energy standard Apple had just popularized - to mimic GPS indoors with turn-by-turn directions. Seven months of development and testing went in before launch, an unusually patient runway for a startup, and a tell about how Ege approaches the work.

That patience shows up in the brand language too. Pointr now describes itself as the Deep Location company, a phrase doing real work: it signals that the product is not a single feature but a stack - mapping, positioning, wayfinding, geofencing and analytics - sitting under a building's digital skin. The partner network grew to match that ambition, with infrastructure heavyweights like Cisco, the real-estate giant CBRE and Siemens plugging Pointr into the systems large venues already run. The investor roster over the years has spanned KPN Ventures, Plug and Play, the European Investment Fund, International Airlines Group's InMotion Ventures, Revo Capital and others, a backer list that quietly maps the company's own ambitions onto aviation, telecoms and property.

Consider the hospital. A patient arrives anxious, often unwell, sometimes in a building that has been extended five times across as many decades into a maze with no logic. Wayfinding there is not a convenience; a missed turn can mean a missed appointment and a clinic running behind for the rest of the day. Pointr's indoor-outdoor mapping has been deployed to smooth exactly that journey, from the parking structure to the right desk on the right floor. UCHealth in the United States is among the health systems that have used the platform to rebuild the patient journey around a phone that finally knows where it is.

Airports are the other archetype. Gatwick worked with Pointr on a mobile experience that won Mobile Innovation of the Year, the kind of award that sounds like marketing until you have actually sprinted across a terminal with a boarding pass in your teeth. The promise is dull in the best way: fewer missed flights, fewer frantic laps of the duty-free, a blue dot that keeps pace with a traveler who is already late.

Then there is retail, where the whole thing began. Harrods did not want a science project; it wanted shoppers to find the handbag department without flagging down a member of staff. That commercial bluntness shaped Pointr's whole posture. The company sells to building owners and venue operators, not to consumers chasing a viral app, and it measures success in deployments that quietly work rather than downloads that briefly spike.

What ties hospitals, airports and department stores together is scale and mess. These are not tidy office floors; they are sprawling, multi-level, constantly renovated spaces where a static PDF map is obsolete the week it is printed. Pointr's bet is that the only way to keep up is to automate the mapping itself and let machine learning hold the positioning steady as the building changes around it. The AI mapping engine is the clearest expression of that bet, and CES 2025 was its loudest proof point.