New York-based information technology and services startup PlaceIQ has nabbed $15 million in its Series C funding round, TechCrunch reported. Harmony Partners led the round which was also joined in by new investor Iris Capital. US Venture Partners, IA Ventures and Valhalla Partners, the company's previous funders in its Series B round, also participated in the most recent fundraising.
Founded in 2010, PlaceIQ provides location intelligence which allows advertisers to reach and define mobile brand audiences for various marketing activities, information from CrunchBase showed. Because it works with agencies, brands and channel partners, Place IQ is able to deliver patent-pending big data science to analyze substantial amounts of location data from different sources. The result is that marketers are able to understand the behavior of consumers and gives them to privacy-friendly method of defining, locating, reaching and measuring their target mobile audience, the information showed.
PlaceIQ Chief Executive Officer Duncan McCall told TechCrunch that the company's approach offers a "proprietary understanding of the world" where location data is utilized to establish a wide profile of the behavior of users. This can be used for ads and then monitoring them if they are effective. Last year, PlaceIQ had grown by over 444% or 70 employees and have become profitable. It also secured $6.75 million in a fundraising round in 2013, the report said.
According to McCall, he told investors that they were not raising money. However, venture capitalists still expressed their interest that he finally evaluated the offers and thought the chance to grow was there-that the use of location data can be applied not only for mobile advertising. He added, "It's sort of the next frontier for understanding consumer behavior."
PlaceIQ is also growing its relationship with ad giant Publicis Group. In addition to its existing collaboration with Publicis' agency SMG, PlaceIQ is now working with VivaKi, the innovation-focused group of Publicis to be able to bring PlaceIQ technology to all agencies of the company, TechCrunch reported.
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