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Geofencing platform Radar announced in early February 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.
Radar will use the new capital to rapidly scale and extend their market lead through the expansion of existing and new building blocks for the platform, increasing impact in key verticals such as retail, quick-service restaurants, logistics, travel, hospitality and entertainment.
Bridging the Digital-Physical Divide
The funding comes on the heels of a year of rapid growth for Radar. In 2021, more than 10 thousand developers signed up to build location-based experiences with the company, and the size of their enterprise customer base more than doubled — including its first customers in fleet tracking, delivery, gaming and healthcare.
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 are an essential tool for businesses looking to differentiate themselves. Radar is poised to meet the nuances of every vertical with its technology.
"There's never been a better time and a bigger need to build location infrastructure,” said Nick Patrick, co-founder 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.”
A Push Toward Location-Aware Services
Radar was founded to give modern product and digital teams the foundational tools needed to build location-aware digital experiences, all while setting a high standard for privacy practices. What’s unique about Radar is its extensible, developer-first platform that enables deep levels of customization to address every industry's unique need, allowing 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, brands can adopt Radar's location services applications within weeks, allowing them 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. He added that Radar is set to lead this growth in location applications, sparking new customer experiences.
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Enterprise and Startup Adoption
Today, Radar allows leading enterprises, such as Panera Bread, American Eagle Outfitters and T-Mobile, as well as cutting-edge startups like 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, providing companies with a competitive edge unique to their specific needs.
Most recently, Radar partnered with Panera Bread to power the company’s next-generation bakery café. The bakery brand implemented Radar’s technology to manage 21,000 locations, reduce friction during the ordering experience and increase customer loyalty. The brand was able to calculate accurate, real-time ETAs and arrival detection — which boosted the efficiency of order ahead operations — and identify when customers entered the drive-thru lane, delivering food at peak freshness and reducing waste.
“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.
Partnerships With Growing Tech Brands
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 will be a critical input in the modern growth stack, with Radar is poised to excel 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, offering 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.
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