PlaceIQ, the company building a new model of consumer behavior by connecting physical and digital activities across time, space, and mobile devices, today announced it has secured a strategic investment from Alibaba Group, the world's largest online and mobile commerce company. The minority investment from Alibaba Group will help PlaceIQ scale its operations in order to meet accelerating market demand for its technology. This investment is a follow-on addition to PlaceIQ's 2016 Series D funding round and continues the company's recent momentum.
This announcement marks the initial phase of PlaceIQ's commercial deployment plans for its location-based technology platform to a global audience, starting with the Chinese market. Armed with PlaceIQ's platform, brands can seamlessly connect their own first-party consumer data with best-in-breed location data and insights, to gain a holistic view of the consumer journey and inform business decisions.
PlaceIQ plans to work with Alibaba Group on location-based online-to-offline (O2O) services such as marketing, consumer insights and data-driven decision-making. Today's news adds Alibaba Group to a long list of leading brands that have validated the ability of PlaceIQ's technology to power data-driven decision-making.
"This new partnership is significant in a number of ways," said Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder of PlaceIQ. "Backed by Alibaba Group, the largest retail commerce company in the world, PlaceIQ can now deliver a new way for larger businesses in China to directly harness the industry's leading location data and insights platform. We are honored in Alibaba Group's decision to invest in PlaceIQ and treat it as validation of the robust technology platform we have spent more than five years perfecting."
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. This includes Place Visit Rate (PVR®), a first-of-its kind industry standard for foot traffic measurement, Darwin, a proprietary data filtering technology that delivers accuracy, and a massive consumer dataset built on understanding more than 100 million unique mobile users and billions of location-enabled data points every day.
For more information, please visit www.placeiq.com.
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, visitwww.placeiq.com. Follow us on Twitter @PlaceIQ and like us on Facebook: PlaceIQ.
