Placer.ai, a location analytics startup founded in 2016, completed a $100 million funding round today led by Josh Buckley (CEO of Product Hunt), according to TechCrunch.
The round also include participation from a number of well-known VCs, including: WndrCo, Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures LLC, Fifth Wall Ventures, Array Ventures and an array of real estate players (J.M. Schapiro, Eliot Bencuya, Jeff Karsh, Daniel Klein).
The fundraise follows Placer.ai’s recent $50 million Series B in April (also led by Buckley, alongside Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg), marks $166 million in total funding raised to date and grants the company unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation.
“Placer provides instant, simple and actionable insights to questions we’ve been asking as operators for over 30 years. The pace of innovation, the unique trust that the company has developed, and the massive market demand all point to the magnitude and scale of what this team can achieve,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Disney excec and WndrCo Founding Partner.
The company says it will use the capital to fund research and development, and expand its sales and marketing team. That sounds straightforward, but it appears the company is going one step further than buying a billboard, and building out its entire platform across a number of new verticals.
That means in addition to its current main audience, it will be scaling its use cases by adding physical and digital data sets for construction data, web traffic and purchase data.
“We’ve been around for five years working with early adopters giving us feedback,” Placer.ai CEO co-founder and Ben-Zvi said. “They pass us known information about their properties and we can use that to retrain and calibrate our models so they get more accurate.”
That startup already boasts 1,000 customers across a range of sectors (property, real estate, retail, municipalities), including names like JLL, Regency Centers, Taubman, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Grocery Outlet.
Now, with new verticals, data sets, and a growing list of industry connections, that number looks ready to skyrocket.