Aggregating Billions of Data Points Across 30,000+ Cities Worldwide, the PredictHQ Real-World Events API Helps Uber, Domino’s, Accenture and Others Predict and Respond to Customer Demand
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PredictHQ, the data intelligence company for real-world events, today announced a $10 million Series A funding round led by Aspect Ventures with participation from Lightspeed and existing Australian-based investors Rampersand VC and AddVenture Fund. PredictHQ arms businesses like Uber, Domino’s and Booking.com with intelligence that helps them anticipate fluctuations in demand for their products and services by aggregating data on real-world events, including concerts, sports, conferences, performances, public holidays, severe weather, and even terrorist attacks. Theresia Gouw, Aspect Ventures co-founder, will join PredictHQ’s Board of Directors.
“For too long, businesses have lacked the ability to truly understand how the movement of people across the world impacts revenue, product usage, supply chain and operations. PredictHQ solves this problem and is already working with some of the smartest companies in the world,” said Gouw. “My team at Aspect Ventures was drawn to the potential of PredictHQ's data platform to unlock billions of dollars in the global economy, and to do for commerce what Stripe has done for payments.”
Developers, product leaders and data scientists rely on PredictHQ’s global events API to understand the catalyst behind people movement and its impact on commerce. Every year, businesses lose billions of dollars because they can’t forecast changes in demand, customer interest and activity. Pinpointing exactly what caused an increase in demand at any given moment is a complex data problem that businesses have tried and failed to solve by themselves. They use incomplete historical data that lacks context and fails to reflect the dynamic nature of events, leaving them unprepared to meet their customers’ needs.
Airlines, for example, don’t know why an increase in bookings to Atlanta one year doesn’t repeat the next, or a rental car service can’t explain why suddenly their entire fleet in Milan was reserved. Similarly, ride-sharing companies can’t properly tell drivers when and where to be because they lack visibility into events at scale, everything from a trivia night at a local bar to arena concerts and sporting events.
“We’re on a mission to help businesses and their customers better prepare for what’s happening around them. We are powering predictive commerce,” said Campbell Brown, CEO and co-founder of PredictHQ. “There are millions of events throughout the world each year that impact specific industries in different ways. Often, there are multiple events in the same place and time creating a perfect storm of demand that no one expected. Until now, there has been no central repository of real-world event data, let alone any intelligence built on that data to make it accessible and actionable. By understanding the impact of events, PredictHQ helps business respond to customer demand and unlock instant profits that are hidden in plain sight.”
Transportation companies, like Uber, use PredictHQ to understand how many drivers are needed on the road at any given place and time. Hotels and travel aggregators, like Booking.com, use PredictHQ to optimize pricing, whereas restaurants like Domino’s use PredictHQ to staff delivery drivers and adjust how many pizza ingredients to stock at particular locations.
PredictHQ aggregates and verifies more than 2 billion data points to enrich nearly 20 million events across 30,000 cities worldwide into a single API. Businesses receive a complete, standardized and enriched dataset that they can use to build forecasting, planning, and marketing models at scale. Developers use PredictHQ’s API to dynamically adjust services, supply chains, features, messaging and pricing based on real-world events.
“Campbell is an incredibly gifted CEO who has a special vision for his company, a talented team, and a product that can create billions of dollars in economic opportunity for global businesses,” said Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Any company selling a tangible good or service - from transportation to soft drinks to computer hardware - needs to optimize their supply chain and understand their demand. With PredictHQ, those companies now have access to the necessary data to do just that.”
About Aspect Ventures
Aspect Ventures, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2014 by two Silicon Valley industry veterans. Aspect raised its first institutional fund of $150 million in 2015 and a second investment fund of $200 million in 2017. Aspect invests across a broad array of industries including cybersecurity, future of work, digital health, and several other emerging technology areas. Current portfolio companies include cybersecurity providers ForeScout Technologies (FSCT), Cato Networks, and Exabeam; future of work-focused companies Crew, Gusto, Chime, and The Muse; and digital health startups such as Vida Health, Grokker, and Solv. Artificial intelligence serves as the foundational technological platform for several of Aspect’s investments targeting key verticals, including companies like Amino (digital health), Astro & Troops (future of work), and Mapper (autonomous vehicle software). Taken together, the track record of the firm’s investment team includes 11 IPOs, 29 successful acquisitions, multiple billions in public market cap, and over 500 rounds in follow-on capital raised for portfolio companies.
About Lightspeed Ventures
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 350 companies globally, including Snap, The Honest Company, GrubHub, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, and MuleSoft. The firm currently manages over $6 billion of committed capital and invests in the U.S. and internationally, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India and China. www.lsvp.com
About PredictHQ
PredictHQ is an data intelligence company for real-world events platform that aggregates, cleanses, enriches and ranks real world events into one single global source of truth. This helps businesses better understand and take advantage of the impact that events have on demand, without having to do the heavy lifting themselves. Put simply, PredictHQ is a premium data service that empowers you to build smarter products. Learn more at PredictHQ.com.
About Rampersand
An Australian growth-stage fund, Rampersand invests in and supports the best Australian and New Zealand technology founders, helping support them become major global leaders. Founders Jim Cassidy and Paul Naphtali returned to Australia after working in senior roles with technology companies in Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia. Rampersand has invested in more than 20 companies since 2013, including Assembly Payments, Cog Systems, Expert360, Sendle and PredictHQ.
Contact
Danielle Stickler
PredictHQ@bateman-group.com