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8 years ago, my co-founder Kjartan Slette and I founded Unacast to be the easiest and most trustworthy enabler of global location insights.
Today, we are excited to announce that Unacast and Gravy Analytics are merging. It’s a move with the goal of redefining the location data and intelligence industry.
The challenge - understanding the physical world and location insights
When we started Unacast in 2015, no one fully understood the physical world such as mobility insights and foot traffic patterns to retail stores.
Paradoxically, the digital world, including our online behaviors, social connections, purchasing habits, and media consumption, was well-understood by major tech firms.
We wanted to bridge the gap between the digital realm and the physical world. By bridging this gap, we would be able to provide new insights about human mobility. These insights would lead to companies making better data-driven decisions.
We realized this was a hard problem to solve. And in recent years, creating location data insights has become increasingly more challenging:
- Privacy innovation - Adhering to evolving privacy regulations and standards.
- Quality - Ensuring the reliability and accuracy of our data for informed decision-making.
- Use case - Identifying the use cases where location insights offer substantial value.
- Access - Making our insights easily accessible to a wide range of users, from data experts to those preferring simple dashboard interfaces.
The opportunity - helping companies make better data-driven decisions
Despite these challenges, we believe in the necessity of solving this puzzle. Companies need the right information about people movement to make better data-driven decisions. And it’s not only one industry that benefits from such insights. Unacast works with global telcos and Fortune 500 companies to help them improve:
- Urban planning - how do we build better and more sustainable cities by understanding the changes in people movement?
- Public transportation systems - how can services be improved to become more reliable and efficient?
- Investment decisions - what markets and neighborhoods should real estate investors invest in to maximize return?
- Site selection - what locations have the highest foot traffic and the right demographic for a store expansion?
- Retail operations - retailers know what’s happening in their stores. But where do their customers come from, what’s the demography, and what competitors do they visit?
The future - meeting the customer anywhere on their data intelligence journey
I’ve known Jeff White, Gravy Analytics CEO, for many years. He was one of the first people I met when I moved to the US with my wife and daughter to build out Unacast. While we’ve been serving adjacent markets, we have always shared the same vision. The combination of our two companies represents a harmonization of two journeys with shared objectives.
Gravy’s prowess in contextual analytics aligns perfectly with Unacast’s strength in detailed location data and insights. Together, we can offer our current and future customers a complete customer solution: a full suite of best-in-class data and analytics products to meet the customer anywhere on their data intelligence journey to fulfill our shared mission.
5 years ago, I could count at least 30 companies providing location data and insights. But as mentioned, this is a big challenge to solve. Quality, innovation, and distribution are paramount to success. Today, and as part of the maturing process of our industry, I count a handful of companies succeeding. However, combining Unacast and Gravy gives us an unparalleled opportunity to amplify the scale, scope, and quality of our insights.
To the benefit of current and future customers, we will initiate a period of accelerated new product development and market expansion. Through synergies in data processing, we will quickly ramp up investments in machine learning, our self-service Unacast Insights platform, and a suite of new analytic APIs.
The time has come for a renaissance in the location data and intelligence industry - we are excited to welcome you on this journey and will continue to share more about our plans while staying true to our enduring mission: to unlock profound layers of understanding that can inspire smarter, better-informed, collective decision-making on a global scale.
Thomas Walle
CEO
