As the demand for geospatial data has skyrocketed during the pandemic, Denver startup SafeGraph has brought on a $45 million Series B round to further build out its data offerings and expand internationally.
The round, led by Sapphire Ventures, comes after a year of rapid growth for SafeGraph, as the company doubled its year-over-year revenue. Additional investors include Alex Rosen of Ridge Ventures, DNX Ventures and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Denver’s Palantir Technologies.
SafeGraph tracks data across business listings, building footprints and foot traffic for nearly 7 million points of interest in the U.S. and Canada. The platform tracks how often people visit a certain location, how long they stay, where they came from, where else they go and more.
VP of Marketing and Growth Evan Barry said SafeGraph has an opportunity to offer interested companies access to crucial external data to further their insights.
“There is an opportunity to be the leader in making location data of the highest quality available to the growing number of organizations that can and need to leverage it in their analytics,” he wrote in an email.
The company’s traditional customers are in the retail space, as SafeGraph’s data can help show the impacts of Covid-19 on behavior like travel, leisure and shopping. In the last year, organizations such as Ares Management, Sysco and Choice Hotels have become customers.
With this Series B funding, the company hopes to speed up its timeline and grow its offerings.
“Extra capital will significantly accelerate growing our selection from seven million places to seven billion places and counting,” Barry said.
In addition to growing its selection of places, SafeGraph will be launching out of North America and into the U.K. in April. With its growth targets, the company is expecting to add at least 25 employees to its current 75 person headcount by year-end. Barry said the company started the year at about 50 employees and will continue to scale at that rate.
With this capital at its back, SafeGraph is looking to expand its customer base to include new industries like logistics, financial services and real estate. With more points of interest and a new international footprint, Barry said the company can offer much-needed insights as we continue to deal with Covid-19.
“Alternative datasets are also helping industries understand the larger economic impacts of the pandemic,” he said. “Some of them, such as data on average spend, foot-traffic, and hours worked, are helping retailers redefine and optimize operations, or financial services firms manage their portfolios.”
