Series D Round Led by Harmony Partners with Participation from All Key Existing Investors; George Bell appointed Board Chairman; Corporate Growth Continues with Senior Sales Hires
NEW YORK, Jan. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- PlaceIQ, the company building a new model of consumer behavior by connecting physical and digital activities across time, space and mobile devices, today announced a $25 million Series D funding round and the addition of business leader George Bell to its Board of Directors.
The funding will fuel further development of PlaceIQ's industry-leading, location-based audience platform, which currently provides consumer analytics and media targeting for the world's largest brands in retail, CPG, automotive, entertainment, travel and more. The funding will also further investment in the award-winning Place Visit Rate (PVR®), PlaceIQ's foot traffic measurement technology that provides granular data on consumer visitation across the entire purchase journey.
"PlaceIQ has pioneered a new way of understanding consumer behavior," said Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder of PlaceIQ. "We've spent the past five years building the go-to location technology that brands have adopted to unlock new insights when marketing to consumers across all key industries. With this funding, we see the chance to deepen our ability to serve clients by industry vertical, as well as horizontally along business decisions. Virtually all marketers now see the need to understand their customers via their mobile behaviors, and to integrate this understanding with other data sets to produce new, more actionable insights. This year, for example, we took scaled learnings derived from human behavior and applied them in new ways, such as informing brand decisions outside of traditional media. In the months to come, we will extend the value of location data in powerful new ways."
In connection with the Series D funding, George Bell, a multi-time successful CEO and technology pioneer with more than 25 years of expertise in managing high-growth companies, joins PlaceIQ's Board of Directors as Board Chairman. Mr. Bell has been at the helm of both private and public companies, and managed new digital media models – from search, to loyalty, to mobile – as they have emerged.
"The maturity of its technology and offerings makes PlaceIQ uniquely suited to meet the needs of today's brands," said Bell. "The team has focused on innovations in location intelligence that arm brands with insights about the consumer's path to purchase. It's a privilege to join a company that is expanding in order to meet growing demand from the world's top brands and media agencies. Today's business climate requires investors to make more strategic investments and PlaceIQ's growth has made it a natural choice to support."
In 2015, PlaceIQ received many awards and accolades that recognized its technology and corporate achievements. These included:
In addition, PlaceIQ was granted a new patent, comprised of 28 claims, for its expanding technology portfolio. This new patent recognizes technology advancements that have allowed the company to create a unified view of consumer behavior, using accurate connections between location data, traditional data sets, and third-party data sets.
To meet accelerating demand by brands and media agencies, PlaceIQ scaled operations in the U.S. and abroad with several key hires in 2015. Most recently, Todd Benedict joined the company as SVP of National Sales, bringing more than 20 years of digital media sales and sales management experience to PlaceIQ. Previously, Todd helped launch Primo, a real-time marketing platform for advertisers and publishers, in addition to an eight-year tenure at Collective Media as SVP of Sales. PlaceIQ also named Eddie Smith, a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of expertise in sales and business development, as its new VP of Channel Sales. Most recently, Eddie served as Head of Ads API at Twitter, where he was responsible for building a partner ecosystem that created significant value for advertisers. Previously, Eddie served as Chief Revenue Officer at Topsy Labs.
About PlaceIQ
For brands seeking to understand consumer behavior, PlaceIQ connects physical and digital activities across time, space, and mobile devices to uncover opportunities to learn and connect with audiences. PlaceIQ is a powerful, location-based audience and insights platform that organizes a wide variety of consumer activity data around a targeted precise location base map at massive scale. PlaceIQ uses its detailed understanding of location and consumer activity to reach a targeted audience, and also to derive powerful insights about consumer behavior to inform market and business strategies for national brands. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Palo Alto, Chicago, and Detroit. For more information, visit www.placeiq.com. Follow us on Twitter @PlaceIQ and like us on Facebook: PlaceIQ.
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160112/321475LOGO
SOURCE PlaceIQ
Share this article