Radar, the leading geofencing platform, announced that it raised $55 million in Series C funding with a valuation of $365 million. The round was led by a New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors including Accel, Two Sigma Ventures and Heavybit, bringing the company’s total funding to $85.5 million. New capital will be used to rapidly grow and expand Radar’s market lead through expansion of existing and new building blocks for the platform, growth of the Radar team, and increased impact across industries. key verticals, such as retail, quick service restaurants, logistics, travel. , hospitality and entertainment.
The funding follows a year of rapid growth for Radar. In 2021, more than 10,000 developers signed up to build location-based experiences with Radar, and the size of Radar’s enterprise customer base more than doubled, including its first customers in fleet tracking, delivery, gaming and health care. Today, Radar processes over 100 billion API requests per year from over 100 million devices, with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and support.
During the pandemic, the need to bridge the digital-physical divide in customer experiences has become more urgent amid disrupted business practices, changing consumer behaviors and increased demand, rapidly accelerating the adoption of consumer services. location. Now, location services are at the center of consumer experiences and an essential tool for all businesses looking to differentiate themselves. In fact, the location analytics market is expected to reach $31.13 billion worldwide by 2027. As it soars, Radar is poised to cater to the nuances of every vertical with its cutting-edge technology.
“There has never been a better time and greater need to build location infrastructure,” said Nick Patrick, co-founder and CEO of Radar. “The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of location-based services in emerging use cases, such as curbside pickup, delivery and check-in, and contactless payments, all of which require location awareness to be successful. . Today, we are on the verge of massive adoption in many industries. Together with our valued partners, customers and investors, we are ready to deliver the best location-based experiences for every digital product and service. »
Radar was founded to give modern product and digital teams the basic tools they need to create location-based digital experiences, while setting high standards for privacy practices. What’s unique about Radar is its highly extensible, developer-focused platform that allows for deep levels of customization to meet the unique needs of each industry and allows brands to quickly adapt as they go. as new use cases emerge, such as curbside pickup, contactless check-in and payments, fleet tracking. , targeted push notifications and more. Additionally, Radar’s platform can be adopted in weeks to power location-based services, allowing brands to focus on creating value for customers. Over the past year, Radar has introduced new product features to meet the times, including Travels for curbside pickup and delivery tracking, Tags for Bluetooth beacon detection, and a new design dashboard and developer documentation. Today, the building blocks of the platform can be comprised of localization solutions for any digital product or service.
“The software-as-a-service market, and more specifically APIs, has exploded in recent years to provide immediate access to new functionality, simplify often complex challenges at scale, and enable more use cases,” said said Matt Gatto, managing director of Insight Partners. “With its industry-leading, developer-focused platform, partner ecosystem, and privacy-first approach, Radar is uniquely positioned to lead this wave of growth in the location space and power the next generation of software. customer experiences. We are excited to support the company in its next chapter of growth at a time when demand for location will continue to soar. »
Today, Radar enables large enterprises, such as Panera, American Eagle Outfitters, and T-Mobile, as well as cutting-edge startups, such as Afterpay and Sleeper, to integrate location into their mobile applications. The platform’s building blocks are highly customizable to existing systems and can meet the toughest localization challenges, regardless of industry. This provides companies with a competitive advantage unique to their specific needs. More recently, Radar has partnered with Panera Bread to help power the new generation café-bakery. Panera implemented Radar’s technology to manage 21,000 locations, reduce ordering experience friction and increase customer loyalty at scale. The brand was able to calculate accurate and real-time estimated arrival times and detect arrivals, which improved the efficiency of advance ordering operations, and identified when Panera customers have entered the drive-thru route, delivering food at optimum freshness and reducing waste. With Radar leading the way, the fast-casual segment has already seen 173% higher customer engagement.
“Optimizing the customer experience has always been a top priority at Panera Bread. Over the past few years – and particularly in this pandemic – we have recognized that location services are no longer a “nice to have” in our industry, but rather a requirement to meet new behaviors and demand. Radar’s robust location infrastructure provided the scale and flexibility we needed to enhance our digital transformation,” said George Hanson, Chief Digital Officer at Panera Bread.
In addition to customer momentum, Radar’s ecosystem of technology partners has exploded. Radar integrates with other fast-growing technology partners such as Braze, Amplitude, Segment and Olo to deliver best-in-class customer experiences and deliver value to marketing, operations, product, data and in-store teams. As brands become more sophisticated and connecting the digital and physical worlds becomes more important, localization becomes an essential part of the modern growth stack. Radar is poised to dominate this era of expansion.
Unlike other players in the location space, which has historically been dominated by ad tech and data monetization companies, Radar does not sell or share consumer data. The platform itself was built with state-of-the-art privacy and security controls, and offers training in creating location-based experiences the right way. This approach has propelled the company’s growth at a time when privacy has never been more important.
