u-blox announced that it has acquired full ownership of Sapcorda Services GmbH, a joint venture formed by u-blox, Bosch, Geo++, and Mitsubishi Electric.
Sapcorda is the leading provider of advanced GNSS augmentation services serving the high precision GNSS mass market. The joint venture was formed by the four companies in 2017 to bring scalable, affordable and high quality GNSS positioning solutions to industrial, automotive and consumer applications.
Relevant industrial applications include autonomous vehicles, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), machine automation, surveying, monitoring, and other advanced navigation applications. Within the automotive sector, applications include automated driving and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), lane-accurate navigation, telematics, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication.
Sapcorda has developed its advanced SAPA (PPP-RTK) service based on open formats, and has specifically tailored it for industrial and automotive markets. The SAPA Services were launched in January 2020 in the US and Europe and have been expanded to full coverage of the contiguous US and 32 countries in Europe. Just recently the distribution of the service via an additional geostationary satellite L-Band signal has been announced.
“We appreciate the support and cooperation of all the joint venture shareholders. As a part of u-blox, I see enormous potential for our technology,” says Botho Graf zu Eulenburg, CEO of Sapcorda.
The acquisition of Sapcorda expands u-blox’s suite of location services complementing its existing data services, including its assistance data and communication service offerings. Sapcorda has focused on establishing a platform from which to bring GNSS augmentation services to the mass market by delivering on robustness, reliability and end-to-end security as it relates to performance.
Full ownership of Sapcorda will also enable u-blox to serve customers more efficiently, streamlining certain processes, including reducing implementation time to market and simplifying the integration process for customers. Existing Sapcorda customers will benefit from the continuity of their ongoing relationship with u-blox. Furthermore, u-blox expects acceleration from the leveraging of corporate resources in sales and marketing, and R&D and technology to support the continued development of GNSS augmentation services.
“The acquisition of Sapcorda reinforces our position as a leader driving innovation in the most advanced areas of GNSS positioning technology,” stated Thomas Seiler, CEO of u-blox. “It represents another step forward in the execution of our strategy, which is to deliver value to our customers by means of a comprehensive ‘silicon-to-cloud’ set of solutions and offerings.”
