Near, A Location-Based AI Startup Raises $100M To Boost Its Market Presence

Singapore headquartered startup, Near, has raised $100 million from a single backer, Greater Pacific Capital (GPC) in a recent round of funding. It has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Bengaluru, Tokyo and Sydney. Believed to be one of the biggest rounds ever in analytics-based marketing technology, the data analytics firm aims at expanding and adding more people with the funding amount. Founded in 2012, Near has built an interactive, cloud-based AI platform called Allspark. It helps in creating anonymised, location-based profiles of users based on information collected from various sources such as telecom player, data partners, Wi-Fi providers and others to generate consumer insights. Allspark, the flagship product by Near works in over 20 countries. It boasts of clients such as WeWork, MetLife, Mastercard, News Corp and others. Near claims to be one of the world's largest source of intelligence on people and places, processing data from over 1.6 billion monthly users across 44 countries. The Near Platform powers data-driven marketing and enrichment offerings through a suite of SaaS products. The users of the platform can leverage audience, spatial, retail, among other data in a privacy-led environment. As the company grows, Near plans to sell its services in India soon, while scaling up in other markets Australia, New Zealand and the US. It plans on expanding its team size, which currently consists of around 40 people in its Bengaluru office with a total of around 100 across all the teams. Some of the other investors in Near are Sequoia Capital, JP Morgan Private Equity Group, Cisco Investments and Telstra Ventures.