Unacast Scoops $17.5 Million to Add More Power and Transparency to Location Data

By Sudipto Ghosh On Feb 13, 2018

Unacast Scoops $17.5 Million to Add More Power and Transparency to Location Data

Company Will Continue to Empower Businesses to Make Smarter Decisions by Providing Unprecedented Access to Human Activity Through the Real World Graph

Barely months before GDPR comes into force, Unacast, the maker of Real World Graph, has announced that is has raised $17.5 million in a new funding round. The leading contextual and transparent location data platform scooped the funding round from its lead investors, Transatlantic fund White Star Capital, and joined by strategic investor Telia, a leading European telco, and co-led by existing investors Open Ocean Capital and Investinor, the Norwegian Government-backed investment company, both increasing their commitments.

New Funding to Help Growth in New Markets and Launch Quality Products

At the time of this announcement, Thomas Walle, CEO and Co-founder of Unacast said, “Trust, both to data partners and clients, is crucial to what we do as a company. Our goal is to understand how people move about the real world and present the best possible contextualized data so that businesses can build better products and make better decisions. That is not a trivial task, but this new funding will allow us to accelerate our investment in innovation and quality products for our partners, clients and the ecosystem.”

Headquartered in Oslo, Unacast is on a mission to understand human movement and behavior in the real world, empowering companies across a wide range of industries to better understand how people move, act and behave while maintaining and protecting user privacy.

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With clients in marketing technology, research and analytics, finance, governments, and city planning, Unacast will continue to expand the use of its human movement and behavior data throughout 2018, engaging across more verticals than any other company in the location data intelligence space and expanding into the European market.

Impressive Run in the Data Market

The funding will be instrumental in Unacast’s expansion and in educating businesses on how the use of high-quality, transparent location data can provide them with the information they need to make better decisions and build the next generation of products and services. Unacast’s data can be applied across a wide range of industries and use cases.

Most recently, Unacast partnered with TVadSync, creators of a TV Audience Platform, to help them connect the dots between TV, digital, and offline through opportunities like linking brand TV spots and online video interaction to audience location visit propensity and understanding the location behaviors of TV audiences. Other use cases across industries range from retargeting and attribution for marketing technology providers to foot traffic trends that inform market predictions and population behavior insights for research reports.

Jeremy Fain, CEO and founder of Cognitiv, said, “When we input Unacast’s data into our neural networks, we saw a significant increase in model accuracy —giving marketers even more powerful deep learning solutions and helping advertisers to drive better returns on their media investment.”

Jeremy added, “Unacast’s data enabled improvements in algorithms led to an increase in accuracy and a decrease in wasted impressions. We look forward to our continued partnership with Unacast as its data helps us describe the intricacies of daily human behavior more completely.”

Unacast will be expanding its global presence while maintaining the Nordic values of quality and transparency that have always been at the heart of its business, product development, and working culture. The latest round of funding will be dedicated to continually improving the company’s overall data quality, ensuring that Unacast is representing real-world behavior data as accurately and transparently as possible. The company plans to invest heavily in product and innovation in 2018 while continuing to make strategic hires to strengthen its leading position.

Investors Speak

Uncast is a Trusted Name in Location Data

Christian Hernandez Gallardo, Managing Partner, White Star Capital said, “The location and human behavior data space is still nascent, but Unacast has proven that it is one of the most trusted names in the market.”

Christian added, “Location is a complex data set to interpret and understand, and as the segment grows and businesses require not just data, but the context to extract value from it, they will have a greater need of partners that can support them. Both the industry and Unacast have grown substantially in a relatively short time, and we believe Unacast is primed to extend its leadership position throughout.”

Brendan Ives, Head of Division X at Telia Company, said, “By investing and forming a partnership between Unacast and Division X, Telia’s unit for emerging businesses and innovation hub, we can combine our datasets and offer real-time and richer insights to support a wider range of customer needs.”

Brendan added, “Over time, as more industries get connected we foresee the need for data orchestration so that companies can share and trade data in a secure and trustworthy way, and provide more seamless and personalized experiences to their end-users.”

Jon Eriksen of Investinor, said, “Unacast has built the leading global location platform. The company is well positioned to capture a substantial part of real-world data market, which is estimated to be worth $5 billion USD by 2020, according to market analysts.”