Leesburg, Va.-based Gravy Analytics announced it closed a $7.7 million round Tuesday. The location-based tool tracks event attendances.
Gravy CEO Jeff White told DC Inno in an exclusive interview the new capital will fund its existing growth—specifically hiring additional management and scaling the platform.
"This is a signal from the capital market that they approve of what we're doing and it's time to add more fuel to the fire," White said.
With the funding, led by Boston's Spring Lake Equity Partners, comes a few additions to the Gravy board of directors, as well, from round investors at Spring Lake, Gasper Global, and Loeb Holding Corporation. This round brings Gravy to a total of $21.7 million raised, have closed its Series A round of $7.4 million in April 2015.
Gravy Analytics boasts clients such as Walmart, eBay, and Gannett (which led Gravy's last funding round), and it provides consumer profiles to retailers, publishers and hotels based on event attendance. Think soccer games or concerts or other "key points of interest," as White said.
Gravy uses geo-fencing technology that is able to track a consumer's event attendances based on information collected from mobile devices and other outside partnerships and apps. For example, Gravy knows if a person is just dropping off their kid at a soccer game or if they're going to watch the game. But clients don't get access to individual data. Instead, Gravy shares the results of its analysis in an aggregated way with large consumer companies who are clients. It's similar Uber, which has now started tracking users for up to five minutes after a drop-off and even when the app is closed, raising a slew of privacy concerns.
However, there's big money in big data and large companies are willing to pay up for it.
"You can imagine, if you will, that you're at Costco and you want to really target wine and wine enthusiasts," White said. "Understanding the people who recently went to wine tastings and went to vineyards and went to sommeliers, those are the greatest indicators of what people might purchase there."
For White, raising capital is a lot like hiring. It takes the right circumstances to raise the right round by the right people.
"The old adage of hiring is that good people are still hard to find. Well, good companies from an investor standpoint are still good to find," White said. "It isn't about their management team, it isn't necessarily about their tech—it's when all of those things come together with that marketplace that is exploding, that's a really rare opportunity."
"Every entrepreneur that talks might walk in and think that they're the cutest in the room, but when others tell you that, too, it means something."
Image used via CCO Public Domain — credit Negative Space
