Also on the tour is Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Disney. Placer provides companies with insights into the movement and presence of customers in physical locations
Photo: Yonatan David
After we were informed yesterday about the first Israeli unicorn for 2022, and after another one has joined, here comes another joiner to the Unicorn Club: The Israeli startup Placer.ai announced today (Wednesday) the completion of a $ 100 million C round of funding, valued at $ 1 billion dollar. The current round was again led by Josh Buckley, the founder and CEO of Product Hunt.
Buckley was also joined by the WndrCo Foundation, one of whose partners is Jeffrey Katzenberg, who headed the Walt Disney Studios and is considered one of the most powerful people in the entertainment world (at least until the glorious failure of Quibi). Also participating in the round were Lachy groom, Fifth Wall, MMC Technology, Array, JM Shapiro, Elio Bankoya, Jeff Karsh, Daniel Klein, Majestic Realty and more.
Who came to your store?
The Placer.ai (Placer) platform is based on information coming from tens of millions of mobile devices and more than 500 smartphone apps that use its SDK. Through the development of the company, businesses can know in real time how many guests visit a particular place every hour, day or month; They can learn about the market share of a particular store, how popular it is among the population; Know where customers come from to stay at their restaurant, and where they go from there; You can also gain access to demographic information (gender, ethnicity), interests and income level, or learn about customer abandonment rates and try to understand what it stems from. On the end customers’ side – these can enjoy coupons and benefits tailored to them, depending on their interests, preferences and needs at any given moment.
Placer offers two tools: its SaaS platform, which makes the information it collects accessible in real time to business owners and individuals. In addition, Placer offers its downloadable API to customers paid for by Data Science teams, who need to consume data in order to build models within the organization. According to the company, its 1,000 customers include players in the real estate and commercial sectors, but also the Planet Fitness gym chain, the BJ’s Wholesale Club shopping chain and more.
There is no way to get information about a single user
Despite the impressive development, we are in a number of years where more and more users are demanding more and more emphasis on privacy, while Placer’s product keeps track of audience placements. So we asked Elad Ash, VP of Development and Director General of Israel at Placer, about the issue of privacy, and he replied that Placer does not collect information about people at all, but only about places. Nevertheless, he replies that the information undergoes two processes of dismantling private information: “A process of removing information that may lead to the identification of a user by models of Differential Privacy and a model of K-Anonymity so that the information is displayed with the noise that prevents the identification of a user. Access to end information, and aggregation during which the information undergoes a process of consolidation in order to present the information only on a physical place. There is no way to extract information about a single user. ‘
Placer.ai was founded in 2016 by Noam Ben-Zvi, who serves as the company’s CEO, Zohar Bar-Yehuda its data scientist, Oded Fosfeld, its chief technology officer, and Ofir Lemmel, chief product manager. The company’s headquarters operate from Los Altos in Silicon Valley and the development center from Tel Aviv. The company currently employs about 300 people, of which about 160 in its offices in Ramat Gan.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and partner of WndrCo, which has invested in the current round of recruitment, said: “Placer.ai provides simple and immediate data that answers the questions we business owners have been asking for thirty years. “The pace of product development, the trust the company has built for itself and the growing demand of the industry for this data all indicate the expected level of achievement for the company.” Josh Buckley, who has led the company’s last two rounds, said: ‘We have long understood that the data provided by Placer.ai is essential, but market demand has exceeded all our forecasts. “We see the continuation of the partnership with Placer.ai as a significant opportunity to improve the decision-making processes in the physical world and how those businesses conduct themselves fundamentally.”
A good old age
Born with a joystick in hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. An unexplained hammer holder for calibrating device batteries. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
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