Niantic has announced that it has laid off 68 people as a part of its restructuring process following the sale of its video game IPs to Scopely.
The deal was officially confirmed in March 2025, where it was announced that Scopely would acquire Niantic’s game business, including the highly successful Pokémon Go in addition to Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now.
As a part of the acquisition, the teams working on the projects also moved over to Scopely, but Niantic’s announced that it’s laying off those working on other projects.
Niantic says that the decision was made to effectively make Niantic a start-up under the new name ‘Niantic Spatial’.
In a press release on the move, Niantic said, “Second, we are spinning off our pioneering geospatial AI business into a new company, Niantic Spatial Inc., enabling it to accelerate and scale even more rapidly. Led by John Hanke, Niantic Spatial will be funded with $250 million of capital, including $200 million from Niantic’s balance sheet and a $50 million investment from Scopely. All of Niantic’s original investors will also continue to be shareholders of Niantic Spatial.”
On the move, CEO of Niantic said, “Why? Because we’re in the midst of seismic changes in technology, with AI evolving rapidly. Existing maps were built for people to read and navigate but now there is a need for a new kind of map that makes the world intelligible for machines, for everything from smart glasses to humanoid robots, so they can understand and navigate the physical world. Today’s LLMs represent the first step towards a future where a variety of expert models collaborate to reason and understand complex problems, and many of those problems will require deep and accurate knowledge of the physical world. Niantic is building the models that will help AI move beyond the screen and into the real world.”
“With $250M in funding, some of the world’s best geospatial AI talent, access to proprietary data, a strong customer pipeline, and a rapid product cycle, I believe Niantic Spatial is poised to succeed and, like the games that gave birth to it, to make its own positive impact on the world.” he continued.
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Tom Henderson is Insider Gaming's Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief. When he's not running one of the industry's leading independent video game websites, he's probably playing an FPS like Call of Duty,…
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