About Placer AI
Placer.ai was founded in 2016 by Noam Ben Zvi and Ofer Elarar, based on the observation that businesses and organizations with a stake in understanding physical foot traffic patterns, such as retailers evaluating potential store locations, real estate investors assessing commercial property performance, and market researchers studying consumer behavior, have historically had very limited ways to measure and analyze actual visitor patterns at physical locations at scale, unlike the sophisticated, granular analytics tools available for understanding visitor behavior on websites and digital properties.
Placer.ai's platform uses aggregated, anonymized location data derived from mobile devices, typically sourced from various apps that use location services with user consent, to estimate and analyze foot traffic patterns at millions of physical locations, including retail stores, shopping malls, restaurants, and other points of interest, providing insights such as how many visitors a given location receives, where those visitors are traveling from, how visit patterns vary by time of day and season, and how a specific location's traffic compares to competitor locations or industry benchmarks, information that has historically been very difficult to obtain systematically at this scale without either physical foot traffic counting sensors installed at every location of interest or expensive, more limited market research studies. The company's customers span retailers seeking to evaluate potential new store locations and monitor existing store performance, commercial real estate investors and developers assessing property performance and potential investment opportunities, urban planners and municipalities analyzing commercial district activity, and market researchers and financial analysts studying consumer behavior trends, including using foot traffic data as an alternative data source for estimating retail companies' sales performance ahead of their official financial reporting. Placer.ai has positioned its location analytics as providing valuable, previously unavailable visibility into physical world consumer behavior patterns, analogous to how web analytics tools transformed understanding of online consumer behavior. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Insight Partners and Josh Buckley, reaching a valuation exceeding $1 billion.
