Market atlas
Fifty years of the geospatial market
1180 companies, from Esri and Intergraph in 1969 to the consolidation of 2026. Scroll to move through time: each bubble appears the year its company was founded, then slides into its acquirer the year it is bought. Switch to Landscape to leave the history behind and compare the 1042 firms still selling today, capability by capability.
The timeline needs a large screen. 1180 companies in a single view need the room. On a phone the atlas opens on the Landscape view instead: the 1042 firms still selling today, by segment and capability, each with its record. Come back on a desktop for fifty years of history.
- Horizontal axis
- The year the company was founded. It never moves. The axis starts in 1970, so the hundred firms older than that (Kongsberg is from 1814, Siemens from 1847) all sit on the left edge; their real year is in their panel.
- Lanes
- Market segment, or region (your choice, top right). Click a segment to drill into its sub-segments.
- Bubble size
- A coarse five-step weight, not revenue. A bubble grows as it absorbs others.
- Faded bubbles
- Acquired, merged, renamed or shut down. Click any bubble for the detail.
- Landscape view
- A matrix of who sells what, restricted to the brands still trading. Pick a capability to line up the vendors that do exactly the same thing.
- Capabilities
- 201 of them, in 41 families, defined per segment: a USBL array and a spatial database are not compared on the same axis.
Geospatial marketFounded · acquired · merged · gone · 1970 → 2026
The fifty-year timeline needs a wider screen. Here you get who sells what today: pick a segment, filter by capability, tap a company for its record.
Scroll to move through time · search finds a company at any date · switch to Landscape to compare today’s vendors
Underwater positioning & hydrography
This view needs JavaScript to run.
Method, and what this is not
The dataset is compiled from public announcements, company sites and press releases, and was frozen on 26 September 2026. It covers 1180 companies across 9 segments: 826 still independent, 354 acquired, merged, renamed or gone. Most records carry the sources they were built from; open any company and they are listed at the bottom of its panel.
Bubble size is a judgement, not a measurement. It is a five-step rank standing for rough industry weight, because revenue is simply not public for most of these companies: several are private, many are divisions of larger groups, and a few never reported at all. Read it as an order of magnitude and nothing more.
The capability matrix is a reading of what vendors say they sell, not an audit of what they ship. Each company is tagged against the taxonomy of its own segment from its product pages; where that reading rests on marketing copy rather than on a product line, the company panel says so. Two vendors sharing a row sell into the same problem, which does not make them equivalent.
No affiliation, and names used for identification only. Company names, product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. They appear here for the sole purpose of identifying the companies described, as any factual account of a market must. Listing a company implies no partnership, endorsement, sponsorship or commercial relationship with Oktri, in either direction, and neither does the absence of one.
Coverage is uneven by construction. Western Europe and North America are better represented than the rest of the world, because their deals are better documented in the languages this was compiled from. Absence from the atlas means absence from the sources, not absence from the market.