Real Estate Industry Gets In On $100M Funding Round For Location Analytics Startup Placer.ai
Placer.ai, a company that monitors foot traffic data at a variety of locations, has snagged $100M worth of funding in a round that values the company at $1B.
The company plans to use the money to speed up the growth of its platform and add to the list of data it tracks. The funding round, led by Product Hunt CEO Josh Buckley, includes several real estate executives interested in seeing the platform grow.
Commercial real estate players J.M. Schapiro, CEO of Continental Realty Corp.; Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh of Tryperion Partners; Daniel Klein of Baltimore-based Klein Enterprises; and Majestic Realty were all participants in the funding round.
This interest from the CRE sector is not surprising. In a statement announcing the news, Placer.ai CEO and co-founder Noam Ben-Zvi said the company had experienced notable growth in 2021 as CRE and retail businesses leaned on Placer’s analytics to help make decisions on the ground.
At the Weitzman Annual Dallas-Fort Worth Forecast event Wednesday, Ben-Zvi noted that real estate is expensive, decisions are hard to reverse and it can take a long time to know whether the decision was the right one.
“The more data you have, the more you can make informed decisions,” Ben-Zvi told Weitzman Chief Marketing Officer Leisa Barger.
The continued impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on commercial real estate also created new interest in Placer’s offerings from customers who might be “using Placer's tools for M&A due diligence, or to help determine interesting opportunities for investment,” Yahoo News reported.
“Yet, location analytics is just the foundation for a much broader and more comprehensive vision,” Ben-Zvi said.
The three-year-old company plans to use the funding to add information on vehicle traffic, planned construction and purchase data to its analytics and data offerings, Ben-Zvi said. The money comes about eight months after another funding round in which it raised $50M, according to TechCrunch.
Placer counts JLL, Regency Centers, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Taubman and Grocery Outlet among its roughly 1,000 customers. The company uses anonymized location data from devices including cellphones to generate information about consumers, including where they go and when.
