Step inside a 2-million-square-foot hospital and watch your phone get confused. The little blue dot that confidently guided you across town spins, drifts, and gives up at the front door. This is the exact spot where Pointr starts working. Open a venue app it powers, and the dot snaps back to life - you, on the third floor, forty feet from radiology, with a line drawn to the door.
Pointr is an indoor location company. That sentence sounds small until you notice how much of human life happens under a roof. Airports, malls, offices, hospitals, convention halls - the buildings where people actually get lost are the ones GPS satellites cannot see into. Pointr maps that interior world and makes it navigable, one venue at a time, now past 7 billion square feet of it.
"We deliver reliable and intuitive location experiences to connect people with buildings, at scale."
- Pointr, on what it actually doesThe problem they saw
Outside is solved. Inside is a maze.
Outdoor navigation is a settled question. A constellation of satellites and a free app have made getting across a city trivial. Inside, though, the satellites lose their signal against concrete and steel, and the experience reverts to something medieval: paper maps, "you are here" stickers, and a helpful stranger pointing vaguely down a corridor.
The cost of that gap is not just annoyance. Patients miss appointments because they cannot find the clinic. Travelers sprint past gates. Shoppers give up and leave. Buildings get bigger and more complicated every year, and the tools for finding your way around them mostly did not.
The hardest part of getting somewhere is the last 100 meters - and they're almost always indoors.
The case for indoor location, in one lineThe founders' bet
A Harrods request, and an Apple chip
In 2013, Ege Akpinar started a company called Indoorz. The spark was almost comically specific: the London department store Harrods wanted a mobile guide to help shoppers find their way around inside. At the same moment, Apple shipped the iBeacon - a tiny Bluetooth Low Energy broadcaster that could whisper "you're near me" to any phone in range. Akpinar, a computer scientist trained at Imperial College London and Bogazici University in Istanbul, saw the two halves of a solution.
He was joined in early 2014 by co-founders Axel Katalan, Can Akpinar and Chris Charles. Later that year the company renamed itself Pointr, after a client asked the very reasonable question of whether the technology could also work outdoors. The name stuck. The bet underneath it was that indoor location would become infrastructure - something every large building eventually needs, the way every website eventually needed search.
The founding cast
- Ege Akpinar - Founder & CEO. Computer scientist, ex-technology consultant, the one who said yes to Harrods.
- Axel Katalan - Co-founder, joined the early team in 2014.
- Can Akpinar - Co-founder.
- Chris Charles - Co-founder.
The product
Deep Location, and the death of the manual map
Pointr's platform goes by the name Deep Location. It bundles three things that used to be separate headaches - mapping, positioning, and navigation - into one system. But the piece that makes operators lean forward is the unglamorous one: AI mapping. Hand Pointr a static floor plan, the kind of PDF a building manager has buried in a drawer, and its engine turns it into a live, navigable digital map in minutes. The old way took weeks of manual drafting per venue. At 5,000 venues, "weeks each" is not a business; "minutes each" is.
Floor plan in. Navigable digital twin out. The boring miracle is the speed.
On Pointr's AI mapping engineOn top of the map sits the blue dot - indoor positioning that fuses Bluetooth signals, beacons, and a phone's own sensors to figure out where you are when the satellites cannot. Around it, Pointr layers the things that make the map pay for itself: geofencing and location triggers for contextual messages, analytics dashboards that show operators how people actually move, and Pointr Express, which serves up a working map and blue-dot navigation through a simple link or QR code, no app install required.
Deep Location
The core platform - mapping, positioning and navigation stitched into one experience.
AI Mapping
Turns a floor plan PDF into a navigable map in minutes, not weeks.
Pointr Express
Instant web maps and blue-dot routing through a link - no app download.
Positioning SDKs
iOS and Android kits that deliver the indoor blue dot via BLE and sensor fusion.
Geofencing & Analytics
Location triggers, contextual messaging and dashboards of how people move.
Pointr Cloud
Edit maps, push updates and manage multi-venue rollouts at scale.
A decade indoors
// How a store-guide request became global infrastructure
The proof
Fortune 100 logos, and a lot of square feet
A platform like this lives or dies on whether serious operators trust it. Pointr's customer list reads like a directory of organizations that cannot afford to get lost: Microsoft, Cisco, Siemens, Honeywell, KPMG, EY, PwC, Nike, and the Harrods that started it all. Its blue dot runs in 25 international airports, including Boston Logan, Dubai, London Gatwick and the Washington-area MWAA hubs. Security-conscious clients get the reassurance of ISO 27001 and ISO 27017 certifications.
Pointr by the numbers
// Self-reported scale figures - the inside world, measured
Bars are scaled for legibility, not to a shared axis - the point is the spread, not a tidy ratio.
The 2025 healthcare push is the clearest sign of where the bet is paying off. Pointr acquired Purple Maps to deepen its hospital wayfinding, then went live inside Epic's MyChart - the patient app a vast share of Americans already use. The integration means a patient can tap a link in their appointment and get routed from home, to the parking lot, to the exact exam room. The blue dot that died at the hospital door now follows them all the way in.
A patient who can find radiology shows up on time. That's healthcare's cheapest fix hiding inside a map.
On the MyChart integrationIt is competitive territory - Mappedin, MapsPeople, Mapsted, MazeMap and others are all chasing the same indoor world. Pointr's wager is that automated AI mapping plus enterprise-grade security plus a decade of venue deployments is a hard combination to copy quickly. The funding history is modest by hype-cycle standards, an angel round, a Series A backed by Gresham House Ventures, and a 2020 Series B led by Chartline Capital Partners, which has kept the company disciplined rather than inflated.
The mission
Every building, intelligent
Pointr's stated vision is a world where every building is intelligent - where the inside of a structure knows its own geometry well enough to guide you, alert you, and tell its operators how it is being used. That is a larger claim than "wayfinding." It treats the building itself as a digital twin: a live model you can query, route through, and analyze, with the blue dot as the friendly front door to all of it.
"A world where every building is intelligent."
- Pointr's vision, compressedWhy it matters tomorrow
The last hundred meters
Buildings are not getting smaller, and people are not getting better at reading lobby directories. As campuses, terminals and care facilities grow more complex, the value of a reliable indoor map compounds. Add the contextual layer - knowing where someone is lets you tell them something useful at exactly the right moment - and indoor location starts to look less like a convenience and more like plumbing.
So return to that hospital. The same person, the same 2-million-square-foot maze, the same appointment they were about to miss. Only now the blue dot does not die at the door. It walks them in - past the gift shop, up the elevator, down the corridor, to the chair where someone is waiting to help. Pointr did not build the hospital. It just made the inside of it findable. For the people who were about to be late, that is the whole story.
Find Pointr
// Official channels, demos and the deeper record