AI-based Location Intelligence Startup Data Sutram Raises $2.07 Mn in Latest Funding Round to Scale Up

Founders of Data Sutram

The company provides intel on people & places with data from over 250+ sources

The fresh funds will be used to build and enhance new and existing products respectively as well as scale to new geographies & sectors.

In today's world where data is the new oil, alternate data plays a crucial role in business decision-making. With the aim to help bridge this gap between business growth and data requirements across various business functions and operations, location intelligence startup DataSutram has announced a USD 2.07 million in a funding round led by Varanium Capital and Yatra Angel Network. 

The round also saw participation from DMI Finance’s Sparkle Fund, White Ventures, Seeders LLP, the notable angel investors from the banking and financial services domain, and existing investors: IIFL Fintech Fund and Indian Angel Network.

Founded in 2018, Data Sutram was founded by engineers from Jadavpur University - Rajit Bhattacharya, Aisik Paul, and Ankit Das - to make actionable insights readily available for every address in India. The proprietary AI and ML-driven data engine automatically converts raw unstructured data from satellites, mobile phones, POS machines, and several other sources to create insights that capture how people live and behave, available for any location upto 100m granularity.

Commenting on the announcement, Rajit Bhattacharya, Co-founder, and CEO, Data Sutram said, “Today, India is home to the fastest-growing data science communities, however, the challenge here is- without the right data, all these AI & ML models are going to be ‘garbage-in & garbage-out. With Data Sutram, the idea is to create actionable data that people can act on & take decisions that give an incremental lift to business operations”

“The Insurance, Lending & Banking sectors have been showing significant shifts in the last decade. This brings in a growing need for fintech and traditional companies to use alternative intelligence and enhance customer acquisition, credit underwriting, and distribution planning. Data Sutram is addressing these challenges and is playing an active role in bridging this gap” said Aparajit Bhandarkar, Partner, Varanium NexGen Fund.

Data Sutram provides sector-focused data packages that help companies acquire customers, understand the credit risk at an address level, open ATMs, branches, stores, plan resources, do competitor benchmarking and enhance their overall growth strategy. Post this round, the startup is looking to scale its operations beyond India to South-East Asia & the Middle East and further invest in new data sources. The company has earlier also raised funds from 100xVC, Indian Angel Network, and IIFL Fintech Fund.

To know more about the company, please visit : https://datasutram.com/

Driving Growth from India's Retail and Fast-food Sectors, Cloud-based Mapping Software Firm GapMaps Appoints New Client Services Director

Brands monitoring pedestrian activity in post-COVID times to better understand and plan for physical locations

GapMaps, the Australian cloud-based mapping software specialist helping organisations with network strategies and location intelligence planning, continues to expand its international presence, which now extends to 21 countries including India.

To capitalise on this growth opportunity, GapMaps has appointed Subhashish Dey as Client Services Director. Mr Dey is an experienced location intelligence specialist who brings a unique and expert perspective to clients in India and across the Asia-Pacific region.

Having worked with NielsenIQ for many years, he has expertise working with some of the most accurate data sources available in India, which combined with the power and analytical capability of the GapMaps platform, provides key insights for clients planning network location decisions.

Despite COVID-19, the retail sector has adapted to new customer demand patterns and built new channels to market. In India, GapMaps has seen strong growth in the fast-food delivery channel, which is creating demand for data and insights that enable retailers to better plan for and capture the potential of this growing market.

“Since 2018, we’ve been adding five new markets each year and double-digit revenue growth year-on-year,” says Anthony Villanti, GapMaps Managing Director and Founder.

“This growth is due to the ease-of-use and sophistication of our mapping software, which uses the very latest demographic, government and industry data to help clients choose the right physical location specific to their business needs.

“Today, we have approximately 500 brands using GapMaps in sectors where a physical location is required, such as fitness, fuel, grocery, quick service restaurant, shopping centres and convenience stores,” adds Villanti.

Tim Shaw, GapMap’s Director, Market Planning, says, “Many of our customers, especially the global brands, have encouraged us to enter new markets so they can use GapMaps overseas. This contributes to decisions on where we expanded the business.”

As India emerges from COVID-19 restrictions GapMaps is observing and monitoring increases in pedestrian activity in central areas, shopping malls and other retail precincts.

“What’s been interesting is the variability in the COVID-19 recovery process,” adds Shaw. “We expected to see variability between countries due to different lockdown restrictions and when those were loosened or removed. However, we see significant variation in the pace of recovery between large and small shopping malls and central precincts, an inconsistency observed across large urban centres when compared with smaller urban and regional centres.

“The ability for brands to access these insights means they can more effectively manage their physical store networks through the recovery and plan for what’s increasingly looking like a ‘new normal’ in a post-pandemic world.”

GapMap’s clients contributing to international growth include brands like Domino’s, KFC, Starbucks, Burger King, Subway and McDonalds. Eat’n’Go, the franchisee for Domino’s, Cold Stone and Pinkberry in Kenya and Nigeria, all benefitting from the data insights GapMaps provides.

“GapMaps has a unique ability to create high quality location intelligence data and insights in some very data-challenged countries,” says Pat McMichael, Group Managing Director and CEO, Eat'n'Go.

“The quality of their data and simple to use platform has enabled me to introduce world class market and network planning processes to businesses where network planning had previously been quite rudimentary.”

Growth Strategy

“Additionally, where GapMaps sees significant growth opportunity, we back ourselves and proactively enter a market and build a local client base,” adds Shaw. “This combination has proven to be a good growth strategy for the business.

“In India, quick service restaurants are one of the fastest growing sectors. Although population growth has slowed down in recent years, the consuming class growth can be up to four times that rate, which is driving store and shopping precinct investments from global brands.”

GM Platform in India

  

Access to demographic data in some markets has traditionally been challenging, with a reliance on census data that can be more than a decade old. That data is often too broad and not appropriate for local catchment analysis to support a location decision.

  
"With GapMaps we can analyse different local demographic, industry and government data to provide insights at a granular level, often drilling down to a 100 - 250 metre grid to pinpoint an optimum store catchment,” says Shaw. “That gives customers the same market planning processes and experience they use in Australia.”

Sector Expansion

“Aside from retail, GapMaps will expand into some of its other key sectors already supported in Australia like aged care, medical and health, as data in these international countries becomes more accessible,” adds Shaw. “For now, in India, our focus is on retail and food delivery, which is where we can add immediate value to our clients.

“Although the pandemic has impacted retail categories like food and hospitality, it has created an environment where global and local brands are using the time to reset, rethink and reassess their network planning strategies and physical location decisions, in preparation for post-lockdown.”

A GapMaps Advisory team has also been established to support customers in all markets. This team, which is the same people who built the GapMaps platform, provide consulting services, in-depth data analysis and research to help clients with new insights, strategies, and business plans.

About GapMaps

Founded in 2013, GapMaps is an Australian-built and owned company with global capabilities, empowering decision makers in multiple industry sectors refine their network strategies with location intelligence and demographics. Its dynamic products can be easily adapted for any market or industry and today is being effectively used by more than 500 brands in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East and Africa to make location intelligence data easily obtainable for more accurate business decision-making.

Location Analytics Startup Locale.ai Raises Funding From Better Capital & Notable Angels

Rishabh Jain and Aditi Sinha started Locale.ai to help every company with moving assets (goods, delivery partners,sales partners, vehicles etc) increase revenues and get more sustainable demand using real time location data & analytics. 

The startup today announced that it has raised an undisclosed round of funding led by Better Capital with participation from notable angels such as Myntra & Nudgespot co-founder Raveen Sastry and Fusion Charts co-founder Pallav Nadhani in a pre-seed round. 

Since the Covid outbreak, online delivery has been powering the world and location analytics has become the need of the hour for last-mile delivery. They have seen a huge spike in demand from food, grocery, medicine delivery companies who want to reach their customers as soon as possible and get to 100% booking fullfitment.

Their product helps businesses maximize on the number of high-valued customers, increase frequency as well as their repeatability, thereby improving the topline. 

“We help companies decrease their customer acquisition cost by expanding in areas based on latent demand, reduce user churn by providing better SLAs in locations where they drop-off and increase existing customer revenue by doing geo-targeting based on users they move and where they order from” says Aditi Sinha, co-founder of Locale.ai and an alumnus of BITS Pilani. 

In a world where user acquisition and retention on the web is focused on creating user cohorts and targeting them differently, Locale’s aim is to help these companies that have operations in a real-world incorporate the “location” element and go super targeted and granular in their strategies.

They have established partnerships with data vendors to help companies overlay granular external data such as mobility patterns in a city, traffic, weather on top of their internal data to get more robust insights. 

“Location is at the core of the strategies that companies use to capture demand and Locale is the fastest way for any company to convert location data into easily searchable intelligence and the right insights”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, a seed fund with early bets in category defining businesses like Open, Khatabook, Bijak, Yulu & others.

Locale was founded in 2019 and is already working with mobility and delivery companies in the US, France, Argentina and India. The funding will be utilized to scale and expand globally, primarily in the US.

Today, they are ingesting around 1 million location events per day and claim to increase the user conversion percentage by 3x & asset utilization rate by 35% using granular and targeted geo-promotions and provisioning supply in the right locations.They also have made the integrations really simple so that companies can get up and running in a span of a couple of hours. 

Location Intelligence Startup GeoIQ Raises Funding from IP Ventures

Bengaluru based location Intelligence platform GeoIQ has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from IP Ventures. An early revenue stage start-up, GeoIQ has already established itself in the space of location intelligence based on multiple data sources. It has over 25 clients across retail and logistics including Sanofi, Eko Financial, Bounce, Curefit etc.

Founded in 2018 by Devashish Fuloria (CEO – IIT Kanpur 2004), Tusheet Shrivastava (CTO – IIT Kanpur - 2011) and Ankita Thakur (Chief Data Scientist), the founders come with start-up domain & consulting experience, as well as expertise in ML & AI having solved large data problems in their previous roles. Devashish said, “for an enterprise product like ours, the access to the right set of people is paramount. IP Ventures brings together an excellent group of people, with experience across major industry sectors who provide direct assistance on how to tailor our product as per the industry needs."

On the fund-raising, Ankita said, “The process of raising funds was rigorous, transparent, and most importantly from a founder's perspective ultrafast as well. We intend to utilize the funds to hire tech team members, product development and focused marketing.”

A recent report by Gartner states that by 2021, organizations that offer a curated catalogue of internal and external data to diverse users will realize twice the business value from their data and analytics investments than those that do not. The Location intelligence global industry is pegged to be at $25 Billion by 2025. While North America is the largest market, APAC is the fastest-growing region.

Tusheet said, “a strong blend of ML capabilities, data engineering, geo-spatial expertise and a state-of-the-art product is driving GeoIQ. With this unique set, we have married client data with satellite imagery and government data with ridiculous ease.” Since its inception, GeoIQ has built a repository of granular data from multiple sources and now boasts of granular demographic information on 500 million grids (100x100m) across India.

Speaking on his investment in the start-up, IP Ventures angel investor Rajeev Pandiya said, “GeoIQ offers real-time solutions to help allocate resources towards the real Target Customer Group in a cost-efficient manner. In a slowing economy, this can be a competitive advantage for senior management trying to gain market share as well as get real-time accurate data to keep a check on sales teams’ expenditures justifying wasteful promotion schemes, incentives etc.”