Class of 2013 alumni Locomizer have received $300K seed round investment from international funds Impulse VC and Phystech Ventures. The follow on investments in Locomizer may go up to $1.5M by the end of 2016, and the funds will be used for international expansion of Locomizer, who currently operate in London, Japan and the United States.
The investment firms have expertise in scaling technological-focussed businesses and large networks in the US, Asia an Central Europe.
“Locomizer is a good example of how the real world is being digitized and converted into big data, to create value-added products and services for their customers and end-users. This is just one of a few projects that bring a real ‘tech’ meaning to adtech,” says Impulse VC managing partner Kirill Belov.
Major case studies in London have helped provide the market traction Locomizer needed to raise these funds. First, a partnership with Havas Media for their client Jameson, where Locomizer created a 'Lads Map' in the UK exceeded expectations and all KPIs within months.
Alongside Posterscope and Target Media, Locomizer also won the Clear Channel Outdoor Planning Award for their work on the OOH campaigns for Fallout 4. The virtual hotspots were used to create engaging out of home creative, providing the right information to the right consumers at the right time.
Alexei Poliakov, Co-Founder of Locomizer explains the technology in more detail, “Our technology is a smart geofence. Instead of relying on target customers’ close proximity to key locations, we discover and recommend non-obvious places with high affinity to brands, which has never been more possible than with Locomizer’s insights. Our targeting is not location-based, but better – it’s based on where you’ve been in the past. There is an important difference here; while we recognize the significance of location as an indicator of your interests, once we have a good understanding of your profile, relevant offers can be sent to you, regardless of your current location.”
Locomizer continues to improve the functionality of its Affinity(BI) technology by designing new patent applications and adding filtering, matching, and predictive algorithms. The aim is to enrich the generated profiles with more granular information, allowing segmentation across multiple customer attributes in a campaign planning and real-time mode.
Phystech Ventures managing partner Olga Maslikhova adds, “At the moment, Locomizer is focused on winning in adtech space, but the company is not limited to just adtech, as it has all of the capabilities to push its ‘data-as-a-service’ analytics platform across multiple verticals. The startup has already gained a foothold in EU, Japan and US markets. We recognize a huge opportunity for Locomizer to enter and be successful in the Southeast Asia markets as well. Phystech Ventures has a strategic presence there and will support Locomizer’s business development.”
Locomizer’s unique technology of audience discovery and segmentation, called Affinity(BI), is based on biological research into cell behavioral models by Dr. Alexei Poliakov, a cofounder of Locomizer. They continue to improve the functionality of its Affinity(BI) technology by designing new patent applications and adding filtering, matching, and predictive algorithms. The aim is to enrich the generated profiles with more granular information, allowing segmentation across multiple customer attributes in a campaign planning and real-time mode.