Potloc is a Montreal, Canada-based research technology company that provides machine learning-driven social media sampling technology to help consulting firms and brands target respondents worldwide with high precision and speed. Its platform serves B2C and B2B customers across retail, consumer goods, food services, financial services, healthcare, transport/automotive, manufacturing and industrial equipment. Customers include Roland Berger, KPMG, EY-Parthenon, Lowe’s and L'Oréal. The company plans to use new funds to accelerate its go-to-market strategy in North America and Europe and to further develop its social media sampling technology. Potloc expanded from 60 to 230 employees in the past year and plans to hire 120 more staff in Montreal, New York and Paris. Potloc uses social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to target and sample well-defined audience segments for consumer research. Its platform aims to improve the quality, specificity and accuracy of surveys for clients across sectors. The company has executed hundreds of surveys for multinational consulting firms, research organizations, consumer brands, commercial real estate developers, financial institutions and trade groups. Clients named in the article include Boston Consulting Group, Ernst & Young, Mall of America, Carrefour, L’Oréal, Invesco and Cushman & Wakefield. Headquartered in Montreal and founded in 2014, Potloc already maintains offices in North America and Europe. The company plans to use new funding to further develop its solution and expand global reach, including entering the US market with a new New York office and a country head to oversee expansion there. Potloc conducts geo-targeted, non-incentivized surveys through social networks to provide localized consumer insights and shopping-habit data. The company says it can capture responses from about 1,000 people within a one-kilometre radius, which it positions as more granular than traditional phone or web-panel methods. Clients include large brands and property operators such as L’Oréal, Cadillac Fairview, Loblaws, and Cushman-Wakefield. Potloc operates offices in Montreal and Toronto as well as Paris and Geneva and was founded in 2014. The Series A capital is intended to fund geographic expansion into the northern U.S., the U.K., and parts of western Europe, plus growth into new verticals like grocery, CPG, financial institutions, and research firms. The company is investing in AI capabilities to improve respondent acquisition, retention, and data analysis while revamping marketing and mapping customer journeys to scale across two continents. Since closing the round in July, Potloc has expanded its Canada and U.S. sales teams and is hiring about 30 new employees, including for Europe. POTLOC’s platform targets people within specific locations on social media and runs hyperlocal intercept surveys to predict retail and site performance. The company can track insights from roughly 1,000 people within a one-kilometre radius, contrasted with industry phone-call approaches across wider regions. Its product helps retailers, real estate companies and municipalities understand neighborhood shopping habits, improve underperforming stores, and gauge local receptiveness to new businesses. The founders began with in-person iPad surveys and emphasize engaging younger, mobile-first respondents who no longer rely on landlines. POTLOC has offices in Montreal and Lille and plans to open offices in Paris and Toronto. The company will use the new funding to invest in research and development, including standardizing questions across markets, developing sampling algorithms for campaigns, and extracting deeper insights from collected data.

Total raised

$55M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jun 2022