Niantic bought the startup Hoss to develop a library of augmented reality tools

The creator of Pokémon GO has acquired Hoss, which specializes in developing dashboards for third-party APIs. Together they will improve the Lightship platform and the Lightship ARDK. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

This year, Niantic launched the Lightship platform into open beta. On it, third-party developers get access to the SDK for creating AR applications. The release date of the platform has not yet been announced.

Specialists from Hoss joined Niantic as a DX (developer experience) team. They will help improve the Lightship API and tools. The goal of DX specialists is to simplify the work of third-party developers with ARDK.

“As we prepare for the worldwide release of the platform, it is important for us to do two things correctly: ARDK tools (…) and the experience of developers interacting with the platform (…),” commented Kei Kawai, CPO Niantic.

Niantic is primarily known as the developer of Ingress and Pokémon GO mobile online games, both of which use AR. According to a July study by Sensor Tower, “Pokemon” bring the company $1 billion annually.

Hoss is an American startup founded in 2019. In the winter of 2020, we received investments for development from Y Combiner. Companies such as Xendit, AssemblyAI and Zentail work with Hoss.

The Hoss purchase is Niantic’s third major acquisition this year: in January, the company bought the Mayhem platform, and in August, the 3D scanning application Scaniverse.