BROOKLYN, N.Y., Feb. 08, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Radar, the leading geofencing platform, today announced that it has raised $55 million in Series C funding with a $365 million valuation. The round was led by 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 scale and extend Radar’s market lead through expansion of existing and new building blocks for the platform, growth of the Radar team, and increased impact in key verticals, such as retail, quick-service restaurants, logistics, travel, hospitality and entertainment.
The funding comes on the heels of a year of rapid growth for Radar. In 2021, over 10 thousand 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 healthcare. 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 became more urgent amidst disrupted business practices, changing consumer behaviors and higher demand — rapidly accelerating the adoption of location services. 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 globally by 2027. As it skyrockets, Radar is poised to meet the nuances of every vertical with its best-in-class technology.
"There's never been a better time and a bigger need to build location infrastructure,” said Nick Patrick, cofounder and CEO at Radar. “The pandemic accelerated adoption of location services in emerging use cases, like curbside pickup, delivery, and contactless check-in and payments, all of which require location awareness to succeed. Now, we’re on the cusp of mass adoption across many industries. Together with our valued partners, customers, and investors, we’re poised to power best-in-class, location-based experiences across every digital product and service.”
Radar was founded to give modern product and digital teams the foundational tools they need to build location-aware digital experiences, all while setting a high standard for privacy practices. What’s unique about Radar is its highly extensible, developer-first platform that enables deep levels of customization to address every industry's unique needs and allows brands to quickly adapt as new use cases emerge, like curbside pickup, contactless check-in and payments, fleet tracking, targeted push notifications and more. Additionally, Radar’s platform can be adopted within weeks to power location services, allowing brands to focus on delivering value to customers. Over the last year, Radar has introduced new product features to meet the moment, including Trips for curbside pickup and delivery tracking, Beacons for Bluetooth beacon detection, and a redesigned dashboard and developer documentation. Today, the platform’s building blocks can be composed into location solutions for any digital product or service.
“The Software-as-a-Service market, and APIs more specifically, have boomed in recent years to provide immediate access to new capabilities, simplify often complex challenges at scale and allow for more use cases,” said Matt Gatto, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “With its industry-leading, developer-first platform, partner ecosystem and privacy-first approach, Radar is uniquely poised to lead this wave of growth in the location space and fuel the next generation of customer experiences. We’re excited to support the company in its next chapter of growth at a time when demand for location will continue to skyrocket.”
Today, Radar enables leading 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 apps. The platform’s building blocks are highly customizable to existing systems and can tackle location’s biggest challenges, regardless of industry. This provides companies with a competitive edge unique to their specific needs. Most recently, Radar partnered with Panera Bread to help power the company’s next generation bakery cafe. Panera implemented Radar’s technology to manage 21 thousand locations, reduce friction from the ordering experience and increase customer loyalty at scale. The brand was able to calculate accurate, real-time ETAs and arrival detection, which boosted the efficiency of order ahead operations, and identify when Panera customers entered the drive-thru lane, delivering food at peak freshness and reducing waste. With Radar leading the way, the fast-casual restaurant segment has already seen a 173% higher engagement rate from customers.
“Optimizing the customer experience has always been a top priority at Panera Bread. Over the past few years—and particularly in this pandemic—we recognized that location services were no longer a “nice to have'' in our industry, but rather a requirement for addressing new behaviors and demand. Radar’s robust location infrastructure offered the scale and flexibility we needed to up-level our digital transformation,” said George Hanson, Chief Digital Officer at Panera Bread.
In addition to customer momentum, Radar's technology partner ecosystem has exploded. Radar integrates with other rapidly growing technology partners like Braze, Amplitude, Segment and Olo to power best-in-class customer experiences and deliver value across marketing, operations, product, data, and in-store teams. As brands become more sophisticated and connecting the digital and physical worlds becomes more important, location is becoming a critical input in the modern growth stack. Radar is poised to lead in 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 has been built with leading privacy and security controls, and offers education around building location-based experiences the right way. This approach has propelled the company’s growth at a time when privacy has never been more important.
To learn more about Radar’s platform, impact and open positions, please visit www.radar.com.
About Radar
Radar is the leading geofencing platform powering next-generation location-based digital experiences for enterprises and high-growth startups. With powerful SDKs, APIs, dashboards and integrations, Radar’s developer-friendly, privacy-first full-stack platform offers the building blocks for every product and service.
At a time when customer service has never been more important, the company helps brands deliver cutting-edge, location-aware experiences that bridge the digital and physical divide in today’s world. Radar is backed by leading venture capital firms including Insight Partners, Accel, Two Sigma Ventures, Heavybit, Prime Set and Bedrock Capital. Founded in 2016, Radar is headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, visit radar.com or follow us on Twitter @radarlabs.
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight Partners has invested in more than 400 companies worldwide and has raised through a series of funds more than $30 billion in capital commitments. Insight's mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Across its people and its portfolio, Insight encourages a culture around a belief that ScaleUp companies and growth create opportunity for all. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.
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