At the time of its acquisition by Nokia, Navteq was the largest maker of automotive-grade map data used in car navigation equipment. Navteq was an American company founded in 1985 as Karlin & Collins, Inc., later known as Navigation Technologies Corporation and eventually as Navteq. The company is also working on self-driving technology. HERE has maps of nearly 200 countries, offers voice guided navigation in 94 countries, provides live traffic information in 33 countries and has indoor maps available for about 49,000 unique buildings in 45 countries. It provides location services through its own HERE applications, and also for GIS and government clients and other providers, such as Bing, Facebook and Yahoo! Maps. In addition, HERE provides platform services to smartphones.
This third-party licensing constitutes the core of the firm's business. It then sells or licenses that mapping content, along with map related navigation and location services to other businesses such as Alpine, Garmin, BMW, Oracle and. HERE captures location content such as road networks, buildings, parks and traffic patterns. HERE is currently based in The Netherlands. Its roots date back to U.S.-based Navteq in 1985, which was acquired by Finland-based Nokia in 2007. It is majority-owned by a consortium of German automotive companies (namely Audi, BMW, Daimler) and American semiconductor company Intel whilst other companies also own minority stakes. HERE Technologies ( trading as HERE) is a multinational group dealing with mapping, location data and related automotive services to individuals and companies.