PlaceIQ provides location tools and the LandMark location data product, focused on selling location data to marketers and measurement platforms. The company recently divested its advertising/media business to Zeta Global and says it has returned to a data-only model. It announced a multi-year strategic partnership and investment from Experian under which Experian Marketing Services will license PlaceIQ’s LandMark data and integrate it into its suite. CEO Duncan McCall said the investment was part of a modest growth round but declined to disclose the size or terms. PlaceIQ previously expanded into ad sales because infrastructure earlier didn’t allow easy incorporation of location data into ad-buying; the company says it can now refocus on selling data across ad platforms. According to Crunchbase, PlaceIQ has previously raised a total of $52 million; Alibaba has also backed the company. PlaceIQ combines location data with marketers' first-party data to provide a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and intent — for example, distinguishing casual visits from active shopping and predicting media preferences. Its core product layers location signals onto marketer data to support use cases across marketing, product recommendations and business decision-making. The company emphasizes that its core value is in its data and technology. PlaceIQ announced a $25 million round earlier this year; the Alibaba investment is an addition to that financing. Alibaba will use PlaceIQ’s technology as part of a broader partnership. As PlaceIQ expands internationally, it intends to pursue similar partnership-led deployments with market leaders. PlaceIQ develops a location-based audience platform that connects physical and digital activities across time, space and mobile devices to help brands understand consumer behavior. Its platform provides consumer analytics and media targeting for large brands in retail, CPG, automotive, entertainment and travel. The company also offers Place Visit Rate (PVR®), a foot-traffic measurement product that provides granular visitation data across the purchase journey. Led by CEO and co-founder Duncan McCall, PlaceIQ said it will use new funding to further develop its location-based audience platform and to invest in PVR. In conjunction with the financing, business leader George Bell joined PlaceIQ’s board as chairman. PlaceIQ is based in New York City and maintains offices in Palo Alto, Chicago and Detroit. PlaceIQ uses location data to build proprietary profiles of user behavior for targeting mobile ads and measuring campaign attribution. The company emphasizes understanding broader consumer behavior beyond simple geofencing, enabling advertisers to track outcomes such as whether people visited a state after seeing a campaign. It has expanded agency partnerships, deepening ties with Publicis Group — moving from SMG to a relationship with VivaKi to roll its technology out across Publicis agencies. PlaceIQ says it achieved profitability and its headcount grew substantially in 2013, adding more than 70 employees for a 444 percent increase. The startup plans to use location data to expand beyond mobile advertising into broader consumer behavior insights. CEO Duncan McCall leads strategy as the company pursues growth. PlaceIQ builds hyper-local advertising technology that breaks the world into blocks and determines which ads will most resonate with users based on their time and location. The platform ingests both open-source and commercial location datasets to infer purchase intent and serve timely offers. The company recently introduced a metric called Place Visit Rate to measure real-world ROI from location-targeted ads. To validate that metric it partnered with Starcom MediaVest Group to correlate ad exposure with in-store visits. PlaceIQ has also made key senior hires, adding Tony Nethercutt as chief revenue officer and Anna Nguyen as chief operating officer. The company, founded in 2010, raised new capital to expand these product and measurement efforts.

Total raised

$52M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Jan 2016