Footfall innovator Placer.ai raises $12m

The location analytics supplier for retail property has raised funding to drive new features, but stopped short of saying what they will be at this stage.

The round was led by JBV Capital with participation from Aleph, Reciprocal Ventures, OCA Ventures, existing investors and a group of new strategic investors.

The funding will be used to help grow Placer.ai’s US operation and expand the company’s R&D efforts to drive new product features and capabilities.

Placer.ai’s SaaS platform claims to be the first to provide real-time access to location analytics and foot traffic data. The solution empowers professionals to improve decision-making, reduce risk and identify opportunities with accurate, reliable location data.

Noam Ben-Zvi, co-founder and CEO, said: “The impact of the ‘retail apocalypse’ was accelerated by a fundamental lack of visibility into offline performance; but empowering brands with accurate, reliable data enables them to navigate this new reality.”

Customers include JLL, Regency, SRS, Brixmor, Verizon, Caesars Entertainment. These companies leverage the product to improve site selection, leasing activities, marketing performance and attribution, property acquisition, asset management and more.

“Placer’s rapid growth has been amazing to witness,” said Jeffrey Bazar, general partner at JBV Capital and new board member at Placer.ai. “Noam and his team have done a remarkable job simplifying and standardizing how companies of all sizes support these business-critical use cases. As a result, they have built the new clear software leader in the industry, which represents an incredibly large market that can’t adopt Placer’s solution fast enough.”

Ben-Zvi’s previous business, BlueTail delivered social and data mining services for driving sales leads. BlueTail was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. Placer.ai was established in 2014 and is based in San Francisco.