PlaceIQ Raises $6.75 Million To Serve You Ads Based On Your Location

Hyper-local ad startup PlaceIQ has raised an additional $6.75 million in Series B financing to enable marketers to target their messages to users based on location. The funding was led by U.S. Venture Partners, with participation from IA Ventures, Valhalla Partners, KBS Ventures, and some angel investors.

PlaceIQ was founded in 2010 as a way to leverage both the increasingly granular data that can be found about the physical location of different shops and restaurants and whatnot, as well as all the location data that is now shared via our mobile phones. With that in mind, the startup’s technology works by breaking the world down into blocks, and then determining what ads will most resonate with users based on their time and location.

Using data from both open sources and commercial data sets, it takes certain cues based on a user’s location and then makes certain assumptions purchase intent. In other words, thanks to the wonders of mobile phones and location technology, PlaceIQ can target you with an ad or a coupon for Taco Bell as you stumble out of a bar at 1:00 am.

The new funding comes as PlaceIQ has made a number of recent steps to prove out its model for hyper-local targeting. It recently introduced a metric called Place Visit Rate to measure real-world ROI on ads targeted by location. To do so, it partnered with Starcom MediaVest Group, and together the companies will be working to show a correlation between users being shown an ad and actually showing up in a physical store.

The company has also made some key hires recently, bringing on Tony Nethercutt as its chief revenue officer and Anna Nguyen as its chief operating officer. Nethercutt had previously served as VP of Sales at YouTube (sold to Google) and AdMob (also sold to Google), while Nguyen had previously been SVP of operations at mobile ad network Mojiva, as well as head of revenue operations at Google and YouTube Japan.