Seattle-area startup Point Inside has raised a $3.5 million round led by Florida-based private equity investment firm Vestech Partners to help fuel growth of its indoor mapping platform.
What they do: Founded in 2009, the company began mapping public indoor venues such as malls, airports, and stadiums before it expanded to physical retailers. Customers such as Lowe’s and Target use Point Inside to digitize their physical store footprints and collect indoor positioning data. Its “StoreMode” software gives retailers a way to create digital store maps; track inventory; offer special deals; and more.
Point Inside can also tie together data from IoT devices with location-related context. The company offers both SDKs and a hosted maps solution. Competitors include fellow Seattle startup Cartogram; Esri; Spreo; Maze Map; indoo.rs; and Indoor Atlas.
Why it matters: As more people opt to buy products online — Cyber Monday was the largest online shopping day in U.S. history — brick-and-mortar retailers are looking for ways to enhance the in-person shopping experience with technology. Other examples of this include Amazon and other companies that are developing checkout-free services at grocery stores.
Location data can also be more valuable when paired with the increasing use of IoT devices that measure noise, temperature, lightning, and other metrics inside a building. For example, Point Inside said it can help airports predict when and where to dispatch security assets, or show mall executives how weather impacts indoor shopping behaviors.
Who they are: Josh Marti, CEO, and Jon Croy, CMO, co-founded Point Inside in 2009. Marti was previously an engineer at Qualcomm and worked at Marco Polo Wireless, a startup Croy co-founded in 2002. Croy worked at Synchronoss before launching Point Inside with Marti, who recently became chair of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce.
In their words: “Point Inside has a unique, accurate and high fidelity spatial platform that can be used for data enrichment and sold widely into the location based data market,” Croy said in a statement. “Vestech Partners’ follow-on investment will enable Point Inside to reach these incredibly rich markets by extending indoor data processing to help so our customers and their clients achieve more from their existing offerings.”
