Placer.ai has racked up a string of partnerships in recent months. And these are expanding the use cases for location analytics, in which Placer is a leading player.
Placer.ai was founded in 2016 as Placer Labs. It is a foot traffic analytics platform that helps retailers, hospitality businesses, real estate developers, and others better understand how locations perform. It does this by measuring foot traffic to and within specific locations.
Here is a simple use case. If a retail brand opens a new store and wonders if the new location will draw traffic away from an existing store, Placer’s data helps the brand understand if this is a legitimate concern. Placer can measure if foot traffic to the new location is drawing from the existing location.
This kind of data is useful to other entities as well. For example, a real estate investor can use foot traffic data one one input to assess whether a property they are looking at performs as well as they were led to believe.
The lending use case is apparent as well. Can a property generate enough income to support the debt? Foot traffic is certainly a valuable indicator.
On a Roll
Placer.ai has been on a roll in accumulating partnerships. These are extending how Placer’s data is being used today and will be used in the future.
In January Placer.ai signed a deal with Esri, a GIS technology provider, essentially to bring Placer’s data together with Esri’s technology to develop new ways to use location data.
“Partnering with Esri is the next step in broadening the vision of what location analytics can accomplish, allowing industry professionals to leverage industry-leading mapping capabilities, better visualize our data, and add significantly more depth to their analysis,” said Koby Ben-Zvi, President and Co-Founder of Placer.ai.
“We look forward to leveraging our enhanced collaboration to redefine what businesses and civic organizations expect from these solutions.”
Placer wants to expand the perception of what data visualization can do.
We can probably expect some product announcements to come out of this announcement soon.
This partnership builds on two deals Placer announced last year.
Back in July, it announced a partnership with Vibenomics to enhance the power of retail media.
And in November it partnered with Finance Lobby to use Placer’s data to support real estate financing decisions.
All of these deals combined are putting Placer in a strong position to hold a leadership position as real-time location data becomes more and more important as a decision-making tool not just for retailers like big box store operators, but also restaurant operators, commercial lenders, brokerage firms and more.
