Technolgy Rules: Experian makes strategic investment in location data company PlaceIQ

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Experian makes strategic investment in location data company PlaceIQ

PlaceIQ is announcing a strategic investment from credit reporting company Experian.

CEO Duncan McCall said the investment is part of a growth round that PlaceIQ raised after divesting itself of its advertising business (which is being taken over by Zeta Global). He declined to disclose the size of the round, or of the Experian investment.

“It’s a multi-year, strategic partnership, where we will work together to license data [to Experian], and they also proactively become an investor in the company,” McCall said, adding that this “coincided nicely with us divesting of our media business and raising a modest growth round.”

Experian’s venture arm has backed a number of financial technology startups. Under this partnership, the company will also incorporate PlaceIQ’s LandMark location data product into its broader suite of data and measurement tools.

Alibaba backs PlaceIQ, a provider of location tools and data

Asked about the direction of PlaceIQ’s business going forward, McCall explained that the company started with a focus on selling location data, and now, it’s gone back to “being a data-only company again.”

“Of course, we would have preferred to have focused on just one business model all these years, but life’s not that simple,” he said.

In his telling, PlaceIQ had to expand into the ad sales business because the infrastructure didn’t exist at the time to incorporate that data into the ad-buying process. Now that the infrastructure is there, PlaceIQ can focus once more on selling location data, which can then be used for targeting on a broad range of ad-buying platforms.

According to Crunchbase, PlaceIQ previously raised a total of $52 million in funding.