InvestmentRetail

The ‘Google Analytics of the physical world’ is to scale in the UK later this year as it looks to support the high street’s recovery post-COVID-19. 

Placense, an Israeli location intelligence provider, is working with Monzo and plans to increase its UK business in Q3. 

The company, led by CEO Dan Gildoni and COO Avi Hadas, has raised new investment – including from Europe’s most active PropTech VC, Pi Labs – to take its total amount raised to $5 million.  

The company, which uses data to demonstrate how consumers engage with retail environments, is seeing an increase in demand for its product as retailers, operators, developers and brokers strive to better understand the consumer mindset and dynamics to help fuel a retail recovery post-COVID.  

It says its technology has the ability to level the playing field, providing bricks and mortar retailers with data points usually associated with eCommerce.  

Using machine learning, it turns data from millions of mobile devices into anonymised location analysis, which can be used to predict consumer behaviour. The company can draw down data from over 30 million devices, and has seen notable success in analysing data for the betterment of out of home advertising such as billboards. 

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We are currently only a small business in the UK, serving clients such as Monzo, since 2020,” the co-founders tell BusinessCloud. However, we aim to increase our foothold by expanding our operations into the UK by Q3 2021. 

We don’t plan to open an office: we are taking an agile approach to building out a team, partnering with local representatives and resellers to provide the best experience in the geospatial and data analytics space for each locality we enter. 

We are ready for the UK market which has an enormous business potential in retail, real estate and out of home.  

Recent data showed that real estate brokers using Placense technology saw their sales conversions increase by 15%, whilst retailers who were using a multitude of sensors, cameras and surveys to obtain data were able to reduce their spend by two thirds by switching to using Placense technology. 

Following initial investment in 2018, and a grant from the Israeli Innovation authority, Placense has received investment from Pi Labs, Zero Gravity Capital, Future Energy Ventures by EON, Nielsen and Blue Minds.  

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Gildoni added: “Our product is putting the power back into the hands of the real estate industry, to support better, more informed, faster decision making.  

The retail industry, which has faced unprecedented upheaval, is harnessing the data and insight we can provide to help its re-imaging and recovery.  With privacy and compliance at the heart of our business, we have the ability to analyse any location to securely offer valuable data to occupiers, asset managers, developers, brokers that they were previously unable to obtain.  

We look forward to working with Pi Labs, leveraging their ecosystem, as we scale our business and expand across Europe at this critical time for the real estate industry.”