Beacons started out as a solution in search of a problem. And now some beacon providers are companies in search of a home.

On Monday, mobile ad platform The Mobile Majority acquired geolocation beacon company Gimbal, a spinoff of Qualcomm.

In June, location data company Verve Mobile bought beacon provider Roximity almost exactly one year after Verve’s acquisition of beacon startup Fosbury.

Gimbal, which collects consumer location data and runs and analyzes proximity and location-based campaigns, has an SDK footprint of 160 million and around 100,000 active beacons in its network. The Mobile Majority declined to share the deal price.

“It makes sense for people to start buying up beacon companies, especially if they do analytics and we’re not just talking about their hardware,” said Andre Kindness, a principal analyst at Forrester. “Like all technology, it’s probably going to be the 80/20 rule – 80% will get acquired and 20% will just go out of business.”

There are more than 500 proximity and beacon companies, each with their own network of hardware deployments. Read more at Adexchanger