MazeMap: 7 Years After Its EIC Accelerator Indoor Mapping Grant

Large hospitals and universities lose money every day to people who cannot find a room. MazeMap, a Trondheim company that began as a master's thesis to guide students around NTNU's Gløshaugen campus, sells browser-based indoor maps of such buildings. In 2019 it won €2,071,562.50 from the EU's EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, for SmartMap: a project to let machine learning draw those maps from building floor plans with almost no manual work.

Seven years after its selection, MazeMap is active, larger and still in the same business. Its Norwegian parent company had revenue of NOK 53.0 million in 2025, 52% more than in 2020, and in February 2026 it announced the purchase of Thing Technologies, a German workplace software company. It has also reported an operating loss every year since 2022, and the €70 million of revenue it told the EU it would make in its first five years of commercialisation is nowhere in its accounts.

What MazeMap Does Now

MazeMap is registered as an active company in Norway's Brønnøysund Register Centre, with no bankruptcy or liquidation, 21 employees registered on 11 August 2026 and annual accounts filed for 2025. Its chief executive Thomas Jelle holds the largest stake through Jelle Venture AS, a company he chairs according to the register. The second largest owner, Fondsavanse AS, is chaired by the Norwegian investor Erik Must, according to the register; MarketScreener also lists MazeMap among the companies linked to him. The shareholdings are shown by 1881, which draws on the register. No venture capital round has been announced, and the investor database Nordic9 keeps its funding records behind a paywall.

The product has widened from wayfinding into what MazeMap now calls space intelligence. On 3 February 2026 it said it had bought Thing Technologies GmbH, the Frankfurt maker of the Thing-it platform for booking desks and rooms and measuring how much they are used, and renamed it MazeMap GmbH, according to releases carried by finanznachrichten.de and BeBeez. Thing-it's founder Klaus Berberich runs the unit as MazeMap Workplace. The German law firm GvW Graf von Westphalen, which advised Thing Technologies, called the deal a cross-border combination. No price was published.

The sources disagree on timing. MazeMap's own company page lists the purchase of thing-it.com under 2025, while the announcement came in 2026. The 2025 accounts fit the earlier date: fixed assets of the parent company rose from NOK 9.5 million to NOK 87.1 million during 2025.

The combined group says it serves 5 million users in more than 30 countries and names ASML, BASF, Deloitte, Hapag-Lloyd, Rolls-Royce, UCB and Oxford University as customers. Those figures come from the company and could not be checked independently.

The Technology: Maps Drawn From Floor Plans

Outdoor maps are built once from satellite and street data and then shared by everyone. Indoor maps are not: every hospital and campus has its own floor plans, usually CAD drawings kept by the facilities department, and turning them into a searchable map with rooms, doors and routes has largely been manual work. That cost is why, as MazeMap told the EU, very few buildings have digital indoor maps at all.

MazeMap's approach is to read the drawings automatically. In its 2016 Phase 1 feasibility study, ScaleMazeMap, the company said its software produced 1,000 rooms per hour of manual work. SmartMap was meant to push that towards full automation with machine learning, and to connect the maps to the facility management systems (FMS) that hold room data, so that a map updates itself when a building changes. Customers own the map data and decide what is shown, which the company presents as its difference from consumer mapping platforms. The maps run in a web browser without an app, and position users through enterprise Wi-Fi, which is the basis of its listing as a Cisco DNA Spaces partner since at least May 2021 and in the Cisco Spaces app store.

The idea is older than the company. According to Norwegian SciTech News, MazeMap grew out of Campus Guide, a master's thesis at NTNU and part of the Wireless Trondheim collaboration between the university, the city and industry, and became a company in 2013. St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim was its first customer, and in 2018 the article reported that missed appointments there had fallen from 2.9% to 2% after the maps were linked to appointment letters, saving about NOK 14 million a year. In 2015 the team won the European Satellite Navigation Competition, a win the company also lists on its own page.

What SmartMap Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

MazeMap was selected at the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 and appears as a single row, with no partner companies, in the Commission's list of selected companies. The grant agreement was signed on 16 September 2019, and the project ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021 with a total cost of €2,959,375, according to CORDIS. It was a grant only award; MazeMap does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio, and CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company beyond the two SME Instrument phases.

The objectives were to take the technology to TRL8 and then pilot it in real buildings to TRL9 for a global launch, to raise automation to the point of "zero-cost productions", and to build more FMS integrations. The company also told the EU it expected "€70 million in revenues and €30 million in profits in the first five years of commercialisation and creating over 90 new FTE jobs".

The final periodic report describes moving map recognition from rule-based logic to machine learning models, a framework to measure how much manual work each model saves, the start of a continuous retraining pipeline, integrations with leading FMS providers for pilot customers, better editing tools, and more secure and scalable APIs. It claims a "PoC for 10x mapping efficiency from project starting point". It also says that Covid-19 campus closures "reduced drastically" the growth in customers during the project, and that Gartner named MazeMap a "Cool Vendor" in March 2020. That Gartner listing could not be confirmed from a second source, as Gartner's reports are behind a paywall.

1. Machine learning map generationDeliveredML models and retraining pipeline in the CORDIS report; 10x efficiency shown as a proof of concept only.
2. FMS integrations and pilotsDeliveredIntegrations delivered to pilot customers, per CORDIS; FMS integration listed as a feature on the company website.
3. "Zero-cost" map productionUnverifiedNo public figure on how much manual work remains.
4. Global commercial launchDeliveredSold in more than 30 countries, per the company; revenue up every year since 2020.
5. €70M revenue and €30M profit in five yearsNot achievedNOK 235.6M revenue and NOK 5.3M net profit in 2021 to 2025.
6. More than 90 new jobsNot achieved27 staff in 2018; 21 registered in Norway in 2026. Staff abroad not public.

The project delivered on the technical side and on time, on a schedule that ran straight through the pandemic. The commercial forecast it was sold on has not come close to happening.

The Money

The parent company's accounts, available through regnskapstall.no from 2020 and through the register's accounts service from 2023, show two different stories. Sales grew every year, from NOK 34.9 million in 2020 to NOK 53.0 million in 2025. Profitability went the other way: an operating profit of NOK 8.0 million in 2020 turned into losses from 2022, reaching NOK 6.3 million in 2025, the first year with a net loss, of NOK 3.0 million.

Over the five years from 2021 to 2025 the company booked NOK 235.6 million of revenue. At any exchange rate between NOK 10 and NOK 12 to the euro, that is between €19.6 million and €23.6 million, less than a third of the €70 million it forecast. The combined net result for those years was NOK 5.3 million, against a forecast profit of €30 million. These are parent company figures; MazeMap has offices in the United States and Australia, and group accounts are not available for free.

2025 also changed the balance sheet. Paid-in equity rose from NOK 29.5 million to NOK 53.4 million and total equity from NOK 39.6 million to NOK 90.9 million, while cash fell from NOK 48.8 million to NOK 25.3 million and wage costs fell from NOK 29.5 million to NOK 19.5 million, according to the register's accounts service. The share capital was raised to NOK 905,000 on 23 September 2025, from NOK 842,000 in the 2024 accounts. The free register data does not say who received the new shares or how the Thing Technologies purchase was paid for.

Why Europe Should Care

Indoor mapping is a small market, but it touches two EU priorities. The first is buildings. The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive of 2024 confirms the Smart Readiness Indicator, a common EU rating of how well a building adapts to its occupants and to the grid, and requires the Commission to make it mandatory for large non-residential buildings through a delegated act due by 30 June 2027. Knowing which rooms are used is a precondition for heating, cooling and cleaning fewer of them, and that is what MazeMap's new workplace unit sells: the company says BASF saved €5 million a year through space optimisation with its analytics, a figure that could not be verified independently.

The second is data ownership. Building maps of hospitals and corporate campuses are sensitive, and MazeMap's pitch to the EU was that customers keep their maps and data rather than handing them to a global platform. A Norwegian supplier that now owns a German one gives European hospitals and universities an option based in the European Economic Area, though no public sector policy currently requires such a choice.

The Verdict

MazeMap has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.