Keyhole, Inc., founded in 2001, was a pioneering software development company specializing in geospatial data visualization applications and was acquired by
Google in 2004. Initially launched as a spin-off of
Intrinsic Graphics, first round funding came from a
Sony venture capital fund and others, additional capital came from an
NVIDIA bundling deal, from the
CIA's venture capital arm
In-Q-Tel, with the majority of In-Q-Tel' funds coming from the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and from
angel investor Brian McClendon (who later came on as a board member and VP). Keyhole's marquee application suite,
Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful
Google Earth application in 2005; other aspects of core technology survive in
Google Maps,
Google Mobile and the
Keyhole Markup Language.