Placer.ai, a location analytics platform serving companies with data around consumer foot traffic, has raised $100 million in a Series C round, VentureBeat reported Wednesday (Jan. 12).
That will value the company at $1 billion.
The location intelligence industry has around a $12 billion market as of 2021, which is a number that could double in the next few years. Big data insights will likely be leveraged by businesses to help their bottom lines.
Placer.ai’s services make it so retailers, hospitality outlets and other companies can get data on their audiences and competition, including getting foot traffic counts they can break down to time of day and customer segments. The data reportedly comes from partnerships with third-party mobile apps, getting aggregated and anonymized data.
“The power of the data rests in the fact that different functions across a company can find value in it,” Placer.ai co-founder and CEO Noam Ben-Zvi told VentureBeat. “The result is a unique capacity to help a business create a single perspective on what is really happening in brick-and-mortar retail.”
Ben-Zvi said that foot traffic was becoming an important metric these days and that data has more value for people because of the changes in how consumers have behaved, with less people going out to shop.
PYMNTS wrote that Placer.ai data showed foot traffic had fallen 6.5% in indoor malls in September of last year compared to 2019. It was also down 5.2% in outdoor malls. However, it was a less-serious decline than the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic.
Read more: Mall Sales Are Up, But Shopping Centers Still Have a Traffic Problem
Officials were hopeful that things would continue improving with international travel recuperating eventually. Tanger Factory Outlet Centers and Simon Property Group both said in earnings reports last year that sales were up at their properties.
Placer.ai’s data said indoor mall foot traffic had been down around 21% in the early summer of 2021, while outdoor was down 8.4%.
Tanger president and CEO Stephen Yalof said one of its processes was to add new sit-down, quick-serve and grab-and-go concepts to encourage activity.
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