#Product hunt josh buckley hyper product series#

We froze our hiring, and waited since some of our customers weren’t even opening anymore.”Ī lot of the data that Placer is able to pass on to customers - who essentially construct their own parameters for searching using a self-service tool - has traditionally been out of their reach despite their best efforts. This is in marked contrast to when the pandemic first descended on the world in early 2020. “Everywhere the rebound is impressively fast,” he noted. Interestingly, he notes that one salient point that Placer has determined is that even with the rise of virtual experiences, physical is not quite dead yet. This meant new customers were, for example, using Placer’s tools for M&A due diligence, or to help determine interesting opportunities for investment. Second, the pandemic gave rise to a new set of reasons to need this kind of data, whether it was to determine crowds at testing or vaccination sites, or because the changing economy was precipitating real estate dealmaking, or something else. “They pass us known information about their properties and we can use that to retrain and calibrate our models so they get more accurate.” A lot of this to date has been about historical data but now the company is shifting into providing more predictive insights as well, he added. “We’ve been around for five years working with early adopters giving us feedback,” Ben-Zvi said. Over time, that core business has gotten smarter. First, people were still shopping, and going to other places, so existing customers were using it to figure out how, where and why people were moving around when they were (indeed Placer.ai created a recovery dashboard to track specifically around this idea and how it related to Covid-19). In actual fact, Noam Ben-Zvi, Placer’s CEO and co-founder, tells me that business has been stronger in recent years than ever before. Given how much our movements have been curtailed in the last couple of years, it’s somewhat ironic that a company whose currency is physical presence in open places would be growing, much less raising money on the back of its potential. The plan is to invest both in building out that user base further, and in the platform itself, by bringing in more physical and digital datasets - for example vehicle traffic, planned construction data, web traffic and purchase data to augment the 50+ data sets that it aggregates today - which in turn will lead to more use cases for Placer’s technology. Today, Placer has around 1,000 customers across real estate and property, retail, consumer packaged goods, and municipalities - some of the names include JLL, Regency Centers, Taubman, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Grocery Outlet - which are using it to determine anonymized crowd movement, size and sentiment to help with their decision making and strategic planning.

#Product hunt josh buckley hyper product series#

This round is coming less than a year after Placer.ai’s Series B of $50 million. Schapiro (CEO of Continental Realty Corp), Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh of Tryperion Partners, Daniel Klein of Klein Enterprises/Sundeck Capital, and Majestic Realty. It’s being led by Josh Buckley, the CEO of Product Hunt with participation from WndrCo (Disney/Dreamworks’ supremo Jeffrey Katzenberg’s investment firm), Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures LLC, Fifth Wall Ventures, and Array Ventures and a swathe of real estate names including J.M. The round is coming from an interesting mix of strategic and financial investors.

Placer has confirmed that the round values it at $1 billion. Placer.ai, which has built a platform to track and understand footfall in a variety of venues, has raised $100 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its platform. Now, as we shift back into more “normal” behavior, a startup that’s helping to better understand where and how we are getting around has picked up a significant round of funding.

Many of us are moving around these days a lot less than we used to - because of Covid, we’re working from home instead of an office and we are traveling and going out less.