Georg Schroth did his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich. In 2007, as a visitor at Stanford's GPS Lab, he proposed vision-based indoor positioning: matching what a camera sees to a stored image map of a building.
At TUM's media technology chair he developed the idea with fellow doctoral researchers Robert Huitl and Sebastian Hilsenbeck. In 2013 Felix Reinshagen, a former McKinsey consultant, joined them and NavVis was founded in Munich.
The first products were machines. The M3 mapping trolley launched in 2014 with a web viewer, and a Series A that year came from BayBG and MIG. In 2015 NavVis raised €7.5 million. A Series C of $35.5 million followed in December 2018.
The hardware shrank from trolley to wearable scanner. The VLX arrived in 2020, the IVION software in 2021, the VLX 3 in 2023 and the MLX in 2024. Industrial and construction customers, not shoppers, became the market.