Oneera, the Nice app that wants to stop festival-goers losing their friends
Junior William Joyant's start-up combines GPS and Bluetooth to guide crowds and help organisers monitor them. After early trials in Cannes, it is working on indoor accuracy.
Losing your friends between two stages, hunting for the exit in a packed crowd: that is the problem Oneera is tackling. Founded in Nice in May 2026 by Junior William Joyant, the company builds real-time maps of festivals, clubs and other venues open to the public.
For visitors, the app shows a map of the site with points of interest, day and night modes, announcements and notifications. Friends are added by scanning a QR code, and location sharing switches off automatically after a chosen period.
For organisers, a live dashboard displays crowd density as a heatmap, can replay movements and gathers incident reports in one place. Staff on the ground see their own positions and get a channel that works like a walkie-talkie.
There is no wristband: everything runs on the phone. The app uses GPS outdoors and Bluetooth beacons indoors, with a fallback mode for when the mobile network is saturated, as often happens at large events. The target is an accuracy of three to five metres outdoors and two to four metres inside.
The first trials, held in recent weeks in clubs in Cannes, exposed the limits of indoor positioning, with avatars jumping from one spot to another. The team is working on adding beacons and snapping the movements shown on screen to the venue's actual walkways.
To fund the next versions, its founder, who owns 70% of the company, is considering selling 20 to 30% to investors while keeping a majority stake.