Niantic Spatial has struck a deal with Coco Robotics to bring its Visual Positioning System (VPS) to the startup's sidewalk delivery fleet. Announced March 10, the partnership targets one of last-mile robotics' most stubborn problems: GPS fails in dense cities.

The urban canyon problem

Coco operates roughly 1,000 robots — each capable of carrying up to eight pizzas or four grocery bags — across Los Angeles, Chicago, Jersey City, Miami, and Helsinki. The bots have logged more than half a million deliveries, but navigating "urban canyons" remains a challenge. GPS signals bounce off skyscrapers, causing position errors of up to 50 meters — enough to put a robot on the wrong block, facing the wrong direction.

Where Pokémon Go comes in

Niantic Spatial was spun out of Niantic after the games division (Pokémon GO, Ingress) was sold to Scopely for $3.5 billion in 2025. The company retained a proprietary map trained on 30 billion posed images collected from hundreds of millions of AR game players scanning city streets over a decade. That database now powers a VPS model that can localize a device to within centimeters from a handful of camera frames.

"It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco's robot to safely move through the world is actually the same problem," said Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke.

What comes next

Niantic Spatial will supply VPS as infrastructure for Coco's fleet, supplementing or replacing GPS in signal-degraded zones. For Niantic, it marks the first major commercial deployment of a technology originally built for games — a clear signal that its pivot to enterprise geospatial AI is gaining traction.