Fifth Wall Invests in Placer.ai’s $50MM Series B
Democratizing Location Analytics for the Built World
In the not-too-distant past, location data was both difficult to access and costly to attain. Despite the common retail adage “location, location, location” — the reality is that real estate decisions have often been made based on limited data or anecdotal evidence validating such decisions. This is where Placer.ai comes in…
Launched in 2018 by co-founder and CEO Noam Ben-Zvi, Placer.ai is radically changing the availability of location data and analytics for several major industries, including real estate and retail. Its software provides geolocation and proximity insights from anonymized data across more than 1.5 billion monthly visitors, tens of millions of active devices,13 million venues, and 500 mobile apps.
While location has always mattered in real estate decisions, it only becomes the right location when the people around it are the right target customers. Placer.ai allows investment decisions to be based on facts about the people living near, working near, visiting, and interacting with a property. Data analytics, rather than hunches, help a company know if the people nearby will make a destination the right location for them.
Fifth Wall’s Path to Placer.ai
Prior to identifying Placer.ai as a potential investment, Fifth Wall knew, through conversations with its limited partners (LPs) — 70+ of the world’s largest owners and operators of real estate — that location analytics and insights were essential to their success. As an example, with the right location analytics solution, brokers could be armed with undeniable proof points to use when approaching landlords and tenants. We also felt that no geolocation analytics firm was properly catering to the industry, so we made it our mission to discover a compelling solution for our LPs.
One such conversation came through a location analytics RFP we launched with our partner Cushman & Wakefield in 2020. Here, we narrowed down our diligence to six companies where ultimately Placer.ai stood out due to its sophisticated data, technical capability and ease of use. One of the most valuable elements of that process involved leveraging the Fifth Wall platform of LPs for direct customer feedback, as a handful of our partners and one portfolio company were already users of the service. The feedback was stellar and we could see a potential industry standard emerging. Finally, we found CEO Noam Ben-Zvi to be an seasoned founder in the data analytics space, leading a passionate team of data science experts capable of extracting valuable insights from notoriously complex and noisy data sets.
In the end, Placer.ai became our recommended location analytics provider of choice. Cushman & Wakefield was equally convinced and chose to launch an extensive commercial partnership with Placer.ai that, based on recent internal surveys, continues to be considered an overwhelming success. By the time we had an opportunity to invest in Placer’s Series B, the decision was an easy one.
Market opportunity beyond real estate
Today, we see Placer as the ‘go-to’ provider of location analytics for a variety of real estate operators and couldn’t be more excited to formally present Placer’s technology to our entire network of LPs and portfolio companies. For landlords and brokers — questions like ‘who is the ideal tenant for this location?’ or ‘what is the health of this property, its tenants and the neighborhood?’ can now be informed with real-time data. For our portfolio of consumer brands expanding their retail footprint — site selection can now be further optimized. We see this as just the beginning, however.
The various use cases for location data are astounding. Municipalities have begun to demand a better understanding of the flows and usage of real estate within their city limits. Consumer packaged goods companies are using Placer to better understand where their customers shop and make decisions about with which wholesalers to work. Hedge funds are utilizing Placer’s data, not only to identify and diligence new investment opportunities but also to monitor existing ones. The list goes on. To add to this, the recent launch of Placer’s marketplace, which enables additional data sets to be layered on top of the platform (such as demographic and psychographic data) — further expands the applicability and indispensable nature of their product.
In just two years, Placer.ai has grown its customer base exponentially and managed to constantly add functionality and valuable insights to an increasingly diverse user base. Fifth Wall is proud to have invested in Placer.ai and we look forward to supporting them in this next phase of growth.
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Forward-looking statements and opinions as to real estate markets or any other matters, as expressed in this post, are those of the individual author(s), but are not necessarily the views of Fifth Wall as a firm, and cannot constitute a guarantee of future success or profitable results. As a result, investors should not rely on such forward-looking statements and/or opinions, or on anything else contained in this post, in making their investment decisions.
The information discussed above is presented solely for informational purposes and should not be interpreted as an offer or recommendation to buy or sell securities.
The portfolio companies described above may not be representative of all investments in funds managed by Fifth Wall, as the number and composition of investments will vary over time. There can be no assurance that any investment will be profitable or that future investments will have similar characteristics or results. Certain portfolio companies may be excluded from this list if the company requests that it not be publicized or included on this website. The inclusion of a portfolio company in the above list should not be considered a recommendation or endorsement of Fifth Wall by that company.
