Uber wants to improve its location accuracy by teaming up with a guy who sold his last startup to Google

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Travis Kalanick

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Travis Kalanick, co-founder and CEO of Uber Technologies Inc.

Thanks to its new partnership with tech startup Factual, Uber will now have even more data at its fingertips.

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The ride-hailing service has struck a deal with the Los Angeles-based startup, which is known for being the driving force behind some of the world's biggest location-based apps including Apple Maps and Facebook, according to a report in Inc.

The partnership is aimed at improving location accuracy for its customers, as well as enhancing its other services, like UberEats, its food delivery service, and its messenger service, UberRush, a spokesperson from Uber told Inc.

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Factual collects an enormous amount of data about businesses, including hours of operation, phone numbers, email addresses and even the kinds of food offered at restaurants, as well as longitude and latitude information- think of it like the information Google collects for its own services. This new partnership is most likely aimed at helping to make Uber's location services and GPS more accurate.

Factual was founded in 2008 by Gil Elbaz, who previously sold another company, Applied Semantics, to Google in 2003. Factual has raised $62 million in funding to date.

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