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Ingress maker Niantic spins off from Google and raises up to $30M from Pokémon and Nintendo

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Niantic, the Google-spawned company that created the popular mobile game Ingress, is spinning out on its own. It has raised up to $30 million from Nintendo, the Pokémon Company Group, and Google.

Niantic makes “real-world games,” or mobile titles that mix virtual gameplay with locations in the real world. Niantic has teamed up with Nintendo and the Pokémon Company to create Pokémon Go, where you can hunt for classic animated characters in real-world locations using your phone or a new device from Nintendo dubbed the Pokémon Go Plus.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.