What is kind of startup is near?

Founded in 2012 by Anil Mathews, Near is a company headquartered in Singapore which collects real-life data on consumers and merges it with online data to create a wholesome profile. With offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Bangalore, Tokyo and Sydney, Near uses a platform based on AI to make real-world data actionable. This platform is which is functional across 44 countries, have about 1.6 billion users each month. The Near Platform powers data-driven marketing and enrichment offerings through a suite of SaaS (software-as-a-service) products. The users of the platform can leverage audience, spatial, retail, among other data in a privacy-led environment (analyticsindiamag.com). While every action in the digital world is quantifiable, in the physical world it’s extremely hard. But now, with mobile devices, what you can get from consumers is their real-world location.

Products and technology

Near claims to be the world’s largest source of intelligence on people and places. They have two products that makes difference on the location intelligence market: Allspark and Carbon™.

Allspark

Allspark gives to Near’s clients an instant access to advanced audience curation & marketing capabilities. Use Artificial Intelligence and data from 1.6 billion users to experience the simplicity of complexity.  Allspark leverages diverse public and proprietary data sets which enable brands and enterprises to visualise and analyse audience location, behaviour, demography and interest data to power strategy, marketing and operations. The data is organized by people and the places they are visiting and represented on a user interface in real time. This lets marketers curate audience segments on the fly, measure their marketing spend’s real-time impact by looking at offline attribution, and plan both mobile and offline marketing campaigns based on where consumers spend their time (Source : geomarketing.com).

This platform gives marketers a glimpse into where customers are spending their time which allows for improved targeting both on and offline. “If you’re a telecom company and you see most of your customers are hanging out at a particular coffee chain or a café, you might want to partner with them for a promotion,” said Shobhit Shukla, CRO at Near. “We started seeing a lot of that happening. It’s not just for mobile ad spend planning; it’s also for a lot of offline marketing planning.” Allspark redefines how brands gather insights about their consumers and interact with them in real-time. It enables you to measure and compare the impact of your business decisions across different audience & locations, and optimise your investment.

Vishnu Mohan, CEO Asia Pacific, Havas Media Group commented, “Allspark from Near is a game changing product for our industry, and takes our data driven approach at Havas to another level. The interface is extremely simple to use and declutters complex data sets with ease, which can be actioned by brands in real-time. We look forward to getting started on Allspark and helping our brands with granular ‘real time’ consumer insights, which can be used to shape their business & marketing strategies.”. Each audience in Allspark is represented by an AudienceCard. Real-time insights can be viewed for each AudienceCard including active audiences over a period of time, demographics and nature of these audiences. Once this audience is targeted around hand-picked locations, the attribution analytics in Allspark enables the user to compare real world conversions across locations.

CARBON™

CARBON™ is the best software platform for enriching your digital-world customer data with real-world attributes, in real time. With CARBON™ companies can unlock the potential of their data to deliver superior consumer experiences. It allows to select data attributes from the Near universe that best suits your use case, such as brand affinity, home location, dwell time, distance traveled and multiple other real-word attributes.