Last week it was announced that Lokku, the UK-based company that started OpenCage Data, has been acquired by Mitula. Together the two companies will form the Mitula Group and become the world leader in classifieds aggregation.

Several of you have asked what the Lokku acquisition means for OpenCage. I am pleased to tell you OpenCage will continue on as its own separate legal entity. We are now registered as our own UK limited company.

As you can imagine the deal with Mitula (as well as some personal transitions - I have moved from London to Barcelona) has been the primary focus for the past months, and that has meant we haven’t been as active on developing the geocoder as we would have liked. Rest assured we are now hard at work on taking things forward.

The good news is that more and more of you have been signing up, and we keep getting very useful feedback, both on what we’re doing well, but also what we could do better. We are on it. Over the course of the summer we plan to leave beta and announce various pricing tiers. A special thanks goes out to all of you who found the service so useful that you are already paying. If you or your organisation needs more that the current free tier of 2500 queries per day, please get in touch we are happy to find a way to support you immediately.

The even more good news is that we have also taken over the running of #geomob, the regular London geo-innovation meet-up that Lokku had operated. It’s a great mix, if you are in or around London please follow geomob on twitter to stay informed. The next event will be July 15th (sign up here), I hope to see you there.

Good luck to all of our friends at Lokku (and now Mitula) as they continue their journey, and thanks for the support as we got started. Likewise many thanks to everyone who has been using our geocoder during the beta period over the last year. We have learned an immense amount. We look forward to the next chapter in our story.

As always, happy geocoding.

Ed