location-technology
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Mauna Kea Semiconductors Corporation
Mauna Kea Semiconductors (MKSemi) is a Silicon Valley fabless chip company building what it calls the world's lowest-power ultra-wideband (UWB) technology - the short-range radio that lets phones, wearables, cars and IoT devices know precisely where they are and which direction they're pointing, down to a few centimeters. Founded in 2019 by semiconductor veterans and headquartered in Cupertino/San Jose with engineering hubs across China, MKSemi sells UWB chips, modules and SDKs, headlined by its highly integrated MK8000 SoC, to device OEMs and ODMs chasing precise location, secure ranging and radar-style sensing on coin-cell batteries.
Pointr
Pointr is a global indoor location technology company whose Deep Location platform turns floor plans into live, navigable digital maps - the blue dot that works where GPS stops, indoors. Its AI mapping engine, positioning SDKs and analytics power wayfinding across more than 5,000 venues and 7 billion square feet of space, in hospitals, airports, malls, offices and convention centers for clients including Microsoft, Cisco, Siemens and Boston Logan.
Gary Little
Gary Little is President and CEO of Foursquare, the world's leading independent location technology platform. A rare operator-investor hybrid, he spent six years running internet monetization at Yahoo, then pivoted into investment banking at Credit Suisse, Lazard, and UBS before co-founding Buckthorn Partners and rising to Managing Director at The Raine Group. At Raine he led the $150M Foursquare investment and negotiated the company's transformative acquisitions of Placed and Factual - then stepped into the CEO seat himself in January 2021. Under his leadership, Foursquare has evolved from a nostalgic social check-in app into the dominant infrastructure layer for location intelligence, covering 190 countries, indexing over 200 million points of interest, and powering the geospatial stacks of enterprises across retail, advertising, real estate, and urban planning.
Manlio Allegra
Manlio Allegra is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Polaris Wireless, a Silicon Valley company he built from the ground up in 1999 to become the global leader in high-accuracy, software-based 3D mobile location solutions. With over 30 years of international business experience spanning video games, Sega Enterprises' European expansion, and wireless technology, Allegra has guided Polaris Wireless to secure 90+ patents, earn multiple Frost & Sullivan awards, and sign landmark E911 Z-axis agreements with major U.S. carriers - helping emergency dispatchers locate people not just on a map, but on the right floor of a building.