In August of this year, a league of leading German carmakers (think BMW, Audi, Daimler) beat out Silicon Valley tech juggernauts like Uber, Google, Facebook, and Apple in a high-profile bidding war for one of Chicago’s most valuable — and most under-the-radar — tech companies.
HERE, a global leader in mapping and location intelligence, was sold by Nokia to the European automotive consortium as part of a whopping $3.1 billion transaction that was finalized earlier this December.
Last week marked HERE’s first day under the new company set up, and we caught up with the Chicago tech veteran to reflect on their growth, Chicago tech, and what they’ve got up their sleeves for 2016.
Mapping out the future
As the auto industry continues to accelerate its innovation efforts to make self-driving cars a reality, HERE has positioned itself as a leader and an asset in the automotive vanguard.
Aaron Dannenbring, a Senior Vice President in HERE’s Core Map Group division, has been with the company since 2003 — back when it was still known to many Chicago techies as Navteq. He’s seen the company evolve through a number of iterations and said it’s been exciting to watch both the company and the industry grow.
“There’s been tremendous progress that’s been made,” he said. “When you look at what HERE is doing in Chicago, it’s really the center of a lot of key development areas — not just for what our company’s doing, but also what is happening in the location services space around automotives and autonomous driving.”
Dannenbring said the express purpose of the acquisition was to maintain and grow a platform that supports all of the automotive industry’s efforts. Not only will they be able to provide a more navigable map experience (thanks to anonymized sensor data provided by the German trio that bought them), but they’re also putting the fundamental technology in place to usher in an era of autonomous driving.
“As we look out into the future, I think it’s pretty obvious that the automotive industry itself is going through a transformation,” he said.
And a significant portion of those engineering efforts are taking place in Chicago.
“The teams here are creating some of the technologies that will underpin how autonomous cars locate themselves and how they actually operate,” Dannenbring said. “To do that, we fundamentally believe — and a large part of the car industry believes — you’re going to need a highly accurate map as a reference that can help extend the range of the car’s sensors.”
Although technically headquartered in Berlin, HERE nevertheless traces its roots to Chicago — and they’ve amassed quite a homebase in the city. They’ve grown into an 1,100-plus force, this year topping our list of the top digital tech companies in the city at number three.
Despite those sizable numbers, Dannenbring said they’re constantly in hiring mode.
And as we cruise toward the new year, that team is revving their engine to help steer some serious innovation in the industry.
“You're going to start to see the area of autonomous driving really ramp up in 2016,” Dannenbring said. “There's already been a lot of press about it. I’m super proud and excited that HERE has a role to play in that.”
Photos via HERE.
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