Announcing the Series A of Placer
Today, Stage Venture Partners is proud to announce the Series A round of Placer, a startup that analyzes foot traffic in commercial real estate. The round was led by JBV Capital, with participation from Aleph, Reciprocal Ventures, and OCA Ventures. Stage VP first invested in Placer in the pre seed round in 2017, and again in the seed round in 2018.
When we first met Noam Ben-Zvi and his co-founders in 2016, Placer was a pre-revenue company just beginning to explore the possibility of using data from cell phones to inform high dollar decisions for the owners, brokers, and tenants of commercial properties. The technical challenges were formidable, as phones were not designed to provide data in a manner useful for this application. Noam and his team – experts in geolocation, signal processing, and data privacy – tamed the messy signal from millions of phones, and turned that data set into a useful product.
Today, Placer has hundreds of customers. Commercial real estate owners use Placer for marketing, property acquisition, leasing optimization, and ongoing property management. Retailers use Placer to uncover trade area gaps, to understand customer cross shopping, and to benchmark their stores against each other and against their competitors. Brokerage firms use Placer to prospect for new clients, to pitch those clients using never before seen data and insights, and to represent those clients with sales material and visuals that give unprecedented understanding of the true activity happening at ground level. Customers include Regency Centers, JLL, Newmark Merrill and Caesar’s Entertainment, among many others.
Healthy real estate is the foundation of healthy cities, and Placer contributes to that health at a time when it’s needed more than ever. Around the country, malls are dying and ten percent of retail real estate sits vacant. Online, etailers can use tracking pixels, social login, and retargeting to communicate with customers with a precision unimaginable in the world of Main Street businesses and brick and mortar retail. Up against competitors armed with tools like these, is it any wonder that so many stores have been closing in recent years? But the era of retrenchment may be ending. Now equipped with Placer, Main Street can finally compete with Amazon.
It’s important to note that Placer provides its customers with data without compromising the privacy of consumers, which sets it apart from the prying eyes of data brokers and trackers that we all encounter online. Placer anonymizes its data and presents its findings in a map-based interface that cannot be used to tell where any individual has been or is now. Customers cannot download source data from Placer that could be used to de-anonymize the data set. Nor do customers need that kind of data to derive value from Placer. No one is going to locate a grocery store in your neighborhood just because you, personally, happen to live nearby. Placer’s product provides value to its customers only because it is a comprehensive way to understand the movement of crowds, rather than the location of an individual. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Best of all, Placer is easy to use and available for anyone to try. You can sign up today at Placer.ai and enter the address for a store, commercial property, or mall in your neighborhood to see the product in action. The product is endlessly fascinating, and it’s easy to get lost for a few hours using Placer to understand your home town in a way you never could before. Paying customers get access to the premium features like store cannibalization analysis, shared audiences, and dwell time reports.
if you’re a public market investor, check out Placer’s blog, where they use Placer’s unique data set to report on publicly traded companies. Recent stories there have covered Starbucks, drug stores, and fast food brands. Hedge funds and institutional investors can also contact Placer to license its alternative data for incorporation to a firm’s quantitative research strategy.
Placer’s journey is only just beginning, and we’re excited to see what the company will do in 2020 and beyond.