Business intelligence startup Cuebiq raises $27 million to accelerate growth and support the advancement of data privacy initiatives

Cubeiq is a business intelligence company that provides its clients with consumer behavior and trend insights. Today, the company announced it has raised $27 million in Series B financing to support growth, product innovation and advancement of data privacy initiatives. The round is co-led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments (PSI), Nasdaq Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners and existing investors Tribeca Angels and TLcom Capital.

“In connection with the financing, Brian Hirsch, co-founder and Managing Partner at Tribeca Venture Partners, and Marco DeMeireles, Head of Private Investments at Balyasny Asset Management, have joined Cuebiq’s board of directors,” the company said in a public release.

Founded in 2015 by Antonio Tomarchio, Walter Ferrara, and William Nespoli, the New York-based Cubeiq is a leading location intelligence and consumer insights company leveraging the largest database of accurate and precise location data in the U.S. Its data intelligence platform analyzes anonymous location patterns to allow businesses to glean actionable insights and better understand the offline consumer journey.

Cubeiq offers its clients with marketing, retail, research, and publisher services. Its marketing platform offers audience targeting, offline campaign attribution, performance analytics, and location insights. Its retail platform offers footfall analysis, site selection, and audience and geo-behavioral consumer insights. Its publisher platform offers audience segmentation, campaign attribution, and data monetization services. Cuebiq’s SaaS platform provides clients offline location analytics, real-time campaign optimization and footfall attribution, as well as geo-behavioral audiences for cross-platform ad targeting. Cuebiq is headquartered in New York with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Italy, and China.

The company has driven significant product innovation resulting in a 3.2x YoY increase in revenue and a 2.4x YoY growth in its customer base. Over 1,300 companies and brands across a variety of verticals use Cuebiq solutions to access and tailor insights to their needs in unprecedented ways. This financing will support further product development, help expand global operations and advance data privacy initiatives currently underway.

Cuebiq’s proprietary methodology enables anonymous collection of location data and analysis of aggregated offline trends. This data and intelligence layer helps marketers with brick and mortar sites better understand offline consumer trends, analyze store performance, measure marketing activation effectiveness and ultimately better compete with e-commerce companies.

Such aggregated insights have shown to provide substantial predictive capabilities for performance forecasting. This enables correlations of trends and sales for a broad range of industry verticals from retail to the investment community.

Cuebiq’s location intelligence also aids app developers in creating better user experiences, enabling delivery of more contextually relevant content and advertising.

As part of the investment, Cuebiq will leverage blockchain technology to create an open data marketplace to bring economic value not just to data companies and their clients, but also to end users.

“As the alternative data industry continues to mature, there are growing applications and opportunities for the financial community to make smarter investment decisions,” said Ashwin Gupta, Managing Director in Goldman Sachs’ PSI group. “Of particular importance to us in making this investment is the fact that Cuebiq is a leader in privacy technology. As we believe data privacy is the defining issue in the consumer insight analysis segment today, we are delighted to be partnering with an innovative company that is leading technology advancement for this purpose.”

“One of our key missions as a technology company is to invest in solutions and services that strengthen the integrity of the world’s markets,” said Gary Offner, Head of Nasdaq Ventures. “We were attracted to Cuebiq due to its unique position as an independent and media-agnostic provider of location intelligence which is gleaned from aggregated and anonymized data. Complementing our investment, we will explore opportunities to leverage Cuebiq’s intelligence for our clients, as well as potentially applying our blockchain and zero knowledge-proof technologies via our Nasdaq Financial Framework to further drive Cuebiq’s data privacy initiative.”

“Since its inception, Cuebiq has been committed to protecting users’ privacy, which has earned the company NAI and TRUSTe certifications,” says Antonio Tomarchio, CEO of Cuebiq. “This commitment made the desire to partner with like-minded investors a critical factor. Cuebiq is not only ready for GDPR compliance in Europe, but is also working with its partner apps worldwide to adopt the same forward-thinking framework. We believe that privacy and transparency will be beneficial to all stakeholders – from end users, to app developers and data companies alike.”

Over the past year, Cuebiq has worked to prepare for GDPR compliance by providing its partner apps with a turnkey solution for improved consent and opt-out management. This includes a proprietary app, under development, that will provide users with an additional way to exercise their privacy rights.

Cuebiq has also been a leader in utilizing data and insights in the service of a variety of causes. Through its “Data for Good” initiative the company shares its location insights with researchers at top universities and nonprofit organizations to drive innovation for causes such as improving quality of life in underserved communities, natural disaster response, and smart city development.