Snap Map is Snapchat’s plan to tie together its online content with ways to augment your offline reality, and its got the patent to back it up. Augmented reality location startup Drop tells TechCrunch that Snap Inc acquired its intellectual property in 2015 including its “Location-based messaging” patent.
In 2013, Drop developed an app that would let you post photos or text to a certain location like a landmark or business, and your followers would get an alert to check it out when they came nearby. By utilizing Drop’s intellectual property, Snapchat could launch a similar feature allowing users to discover location-based messages with the Snap Map or Snapchat’s AR lenses. Snap declined to comment on this story, as usually does regarding M&A news.
Drop won TechCrunch’s 2013 Boston pitch competition, and you can see an interview with the team below. Drop went on to raise a $1.25 million seed round from Atlas Ventures and Spark Capital. At the end of 2015, Drop eventually launched a real-time location sharing app called Firefly. The app was quite similar to Zenly, the social map startup that TechCrunch reported last week had been bought by Snapchat for $250 million to $350 million, and will continue to run autonomously while also having inspired Snapchat’s new Snap Map.
In anticipation of Snap Map’s launch, it appears that Snapchat sought to beef up its location patent portfolio. In 2014, CEO Evan Spiegel filed a patent for seeing other people’s photos taken somewhere and unlocking geofenced photos from friends. Snap acquired a geofilter patent from Yo founder Moshe Hogeg’s startup Mobli for $7.7 million. Prior to its IPO, Snapchat bought 245 patents from IBM, including ones for representing the location of messages senders on a map and estimating the location of social network users. And just this month, Snap acquired Placed to prove how its geofilters drive brick-and-mortar store visits.
Now TechCrunch has learned that in 2015, Snapchat reached out to Drop to buy its location tech IP, according to co-founder Zachary DeWitt. He tells us that “Snapchat reached out to buy the IP portfolio. We…