John Hanke

Hanke led Niantic's split from Google in late 2015 and raised $30 million from Google, Nintendo and Pokémon. He stayed as the company's chief executive and guided the firm through the release of the much-covered Pokémon Go in July 2016, which now generates more than $2 million in daily revenues.

In 2010, Hanke was given resources to staff a gaming unit within Google and the new internal startup was dubbed Niantic Labs. Returning to his gaming roots, the company crafted an augmented reality location-based multiplayer game called Ingress. The game had a million players within a year of its 2013 release, and seven million by 2015.

Hanke joined Google as a part of Keyhole's acquisition, and he became the Vice President of Product Management for the Geo division. During this period, he oversaw the transformation of Keyhole's technology into Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005. He also negotiated an agreement to include Google Maps on the iPhone. Other significant products followed, including StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio. During this period, he shaped a team he would later use to form Niantic.

Hanke later co-founded geospatial data visualization firm Keyhole in 2001 and acted as the firm's CEO. Early funding was provided by the corporate venture group within Sony, and the startup was able to garner significant attention from the use of their mapping technology in media reporting overlays during the early parts of the Iraq War. Keyhole's mapping technology was also noted by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and the freshly-public Google bought Keyhole in 2004 for $35 million in stock.

He moved across the country to attend the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Steve Sellers and his video game design startup Archetype Interactive, which was developing Meridian 59, one of the first commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). They sold the firm to The 3DO Company on the day he graduated from Berkeley in 1996 with an MBA. Hanke and Sellers created another entertainment startup, The Big Network, which was quickly sold in 2000 to eUniverse for $17.1 million. He was quoted to have been recently worried about the dangers of virtual realities.

John Hanke (born 1967) is an American entrepreneur and business executive. He is the founder and current CEO of Niantic, Inc., a software development company spun out of Google that designed Ingress, Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Hanke previously led Google's Geo division, which included Google Earth, Google Maps, Local, StreetView, SketchUp, and Panoramio.

Born in 1967, Hanke was raised in the small central Texas town of Cross Plains and graduated from Cross Plains High School in 1985. He attended the University of Texas, Austin and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1989.