For better or worse, location data remains a fundamental component of app development. Placer.ai, a firm producing AI market research based on location data, has secretly secured $75 million at an increased valuation of over $1.5 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
The startup offers a variety of location-based insights to businesses in industries such as retail, events and entertainment, CPG, retail estate, financial services, and healthcare by merging AI with anonymised data sourced from third-party apps.Another $75 million.
We first learned of the funds through a Form D filed in July, which detailed Placer's plans to raise $75 million. We confirmed with the company's CEO and CFO that it has closed the entire amount, with a new valuation of $1.45 billion, up roughly 50% over its last round, a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation.
The investment highlights the growing importance of location data for firms other than app publishers themselves. And, at a time when more people are becoming conscious of data protection in mobile apps, thanks in part to an increasing number of data breaches, it serves as a reminder of how much data we generate in modern life.
Placer's analytics span basic patterns like foot traffic at a specific location or store — for example, Aldi is currently the fastest-growing retailer in terms of visits — as well as more granular data on who buys what and when, people's demographic characteristics, and so on.
Some have described such approaches as disturbing, yet they are also not uncommon. (Others that track location data include Foursquare, Esri, and many others provide location analytics.)
Like other mobile analytics companies, the startup collects data through an SDK that it installs with hundreds of app publishers, as well as from other third-party sources. It calls itself a "privacy by design" business: The company stated that all of the data it utilizes is anonymised before it is sent to Placer.
The company declined to reveal particular participants in the most recent fundraise, other to say that previous donors participated. According to PitchBook, GEM Realty Capital, a real estate investment business, is also participating in this latest round.
Placer's cap table has more than 50 investors, both corporations and individuals. They include Josh Buckley (the former CEO of Product Hunt), WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg's investment firm), Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures, Fifth Wall Ventures, and Array Ventures, as well as J.M. Schapiro (CEO of Continental Realty Corp), Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh of Tryperion Partners, Daniel Klein of Klein Enterprises/Sundeck Capital, and Majestic Realty.
The company's numbers have been strong. Noam Ben-Zvi, Placer's CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch in an interview that the firm reached an annual revenue run rate of $100 million in February, has grown 80% in the previous year, and intends to expand another 60% this year. It has also reached 4,300 customers (up from 1,000 in 2022, when it raised $100 million). Sony, different municipal development agencies, Wegmans, and Century 21 are among the companies represented on the list.
"What ties them together is that they all have a stake in the physical world," stated the politician.
The funding was raised based on inbound interest, CFO Dean Nese said. The plan will be to use the funding for business development and to add more features and datasets to the platform. It says it already provides users with “hundreds” of these datasets. Placer was founded in 2018 by Ben-Zvi and fellow Israelis Zohar Bar-Yehuda (data scientist), Oded Fossfeld (CTO) and Ofir Lemel (CPO), and it was just two years later that the company faced what you might assume would be a death knell for a location analytics company: the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the world turning away from physical gatherings. It turned out to be the opposite.
At a particularly difficult time, Ben-Zvi stated, "Our data provided a lot of visibility into what was working and what was not working."
among that base among consumers, the company's reach extended in tandem with the world's "reopening" for commerce.
While Placer has always used machine learning and inference to create more detailed profiles based on data gathered from apps, this has now become a selling feature for its end customers, who have been granted permission to investigate how to incorporate more AI into their workflow.
“Customers want a holistic one-stop-shop platform for market research,” he said. “They may ask themselves: Should I expand to this market? How are my competitors doing? What they want is all the underlying data that’s relevant, and all the aggregations and the tools on top. Analytics is a core ingredient.”