Unacast has raised $16m in a new round of funding. We welcome Camber Creek as a new investor, alongside participation from our existing investors and long-standing supporters, White Star Capital and Investinor.
“What makes Unacast truly unique is their focus on quality of their data. Real estate development/management groups, Fortune 500 companies, global consulting firms and several global telecoms rely on Unacast’s platform daily. And with the rapid market acceleration for location insights post-pandemic, Unacast is positioned to lead this segment globally." -- Alexandra Nicoletti, Principal at Camber Creek and new Unacast board member.
Location data is a key piece to understand the new world
In the last 18 months, a world impacted and shaped by COVID-19 has experienced an accelerated need to understand how people move around on the planet, and no wonder.
As the world is coming out of the pandemic nothing will ever be the same. We will work differently, live differently, shop differently, travel differently, and plan our cities differently. The only effective way to properly understand how the change in our interactions and mobility patterns impact behavior is through trusted and accurate location insights.
What you can expect from Unacast in the coming months
While many innovative and forward-leaning companies across retail, analytics, marketing, finance and CPG relied upon Unacast’s location insights to build better products and make better decisions prior to the pandemic, COVID-19 has accelerated that growth, helping us to add many new clients in the last 18 months, including Fortune 500 companies, top consulting firms, and some of the world’s largest mobile operators.
Location data is becoming mainstream and an integral part of teams' decision-making process and product development.
At the same time, over the last couple of years Unacast has had a very high and healthy ARR/FTE ratio, proving the efficiency of our team. Building a healthy, sustainable and high growth company will always be one of my priorities as the CEO.
With the exploding demand for location insights globally (more on that below), we are ecstatic to have new capital and resources to double-down on three areas of focus in order to offer our existing clients better insights and to attract and welcome new users of location data:
1. Unacast is Easy
Data in general is still very hard to understand and complex to buy. That has also been the case with location data. We are continuing to tear down these barriers and committed to building on our transparent and open culture to make it even easier for customers to engage, test, and buy location data from Unacast.
This year we launched Unacast Now, for data scientists and researchers to easily explore, customize, and download their own dataset based on geography, time, or to look up a specific brand or industry they are interested in. Data can’t only live in warehouses where no one can see and try them, they need a store and a shelf so users can see, understand and test.
2. Unacast is Trusted
As a data company, we provide trust. Clients trust us that our insights and data models are an accurate representation of how people move around on the planet. Having worked with world class researchers such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Columbia University, to name a few, is a proud testament to the trust that can be found in our data. But we are not stopping now and our product and data science team will continue our product development centered around trust through transparency.
In fact, one of the five core Unacast values (which you can read more about in our handbook) is Trust through Transparency. I come from a country where transparency is an integral part of the social and cultural fabric of our lives. And half of our team is based in Norway. Norway is built on the transparent sharing of information (even salaries in Norway are public), but we also understand and value our boundaries and privacy.
As a company we believe that honesty and openness, also in regards to our flaws and where our data is not as good (yet) creates the foundation of trust necessary for companies to use location data correctly.
3. Unacast is International
Today, +30% of Unacast’s revenue comes from outside of the US, and it’s growing.
While International has not been a core priority (the US is still a large and untapped market in our view), given our heritage from Norway, we’ve been focusing on GDPR compliance since 2018 and supported many global companies in understanding mobility patterns outside of the US. To meet the demand for our solutions in global marketplaces post the pandemic we are currently building out more insights and products for a significant number of countries, across many contitents.
In addition, Unacast Turbine, where we turn raw location data into valuable, privacy friendly aggregated, human mobility insights, at scale, has seen tremendous growth and progress in the last year. We’ve been the location data processing platform for Telia, one of the largest telcos in Europe for many years, and we are now also supporting global telcos in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the same.
Started in Oslo, Norway - Unacast has truly become international. And there’s more to come.
Come join us and Be Your Own CEO
We are so excited about the path ahead and we are still hiring across all roles. We are seeking people who want to Be Their Own CEO, people who believe in Trust, Through Transparency as we do, and who want to show up to work to Have Fun, Seriously.
If you are wondering what that meant, you can read more about our journey through the valley of values here, and learn about our philosophy that Hybrid is the new Office.
