Snapchat parent firm Snap has acquired Placed, which is a Seattle-based startup focusing consumer location analytics platform.
With more than 100 employees, Placed will continue to operate from its headquarters in Seattle, and offices in New York and Los Angeles independently.
The sources who are close to the deal pegged the purchase price equal to or more than $200 million. This means that the shareholders and original investors in the firm will get a good ROI. Moreover, this is the most expensive acquisition by Snap till date.
However, there is no official announcement yet from both parties disclosing any details with regards to deal terms and financial details.
Placed started its operations in the year 2011 with $13.8 million raised from Madrona Venture Group and Two Sigma Ventures. David Shim is the Founder along with the board members which includes; Matt Mcllwain; Brian McAndrews; David Joerg. The most recent funding came in 2014 raising $10 million.
David Shim, the CEO and co-founder of the firm will stay with the company. David will report to Snap Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan.
In a blog post shared by David explores the possibility of the merger with Snap. David emphasises that they will be able to do more in the near future and cater to a much larger audience in the market.
Since 2011, the startup has been able to provide services to a large base of customers. Placed, has been able to help its customers to measure the offline impact of the mobile ads. Moreover, it helps to get insights into actual customer behaviour.
Placed, measures the whereabouts of its consumer’s location who willingly opt-in for its services. From this data Placed is able to crunch out insights relating to TV ad spending, Amazon impact on the physical market, and also the activity of Pokemon Go users.
Last year, Placed published its own report on the behaviour of Snapchat users both online and offline, analysing which physical stores they went to for their purchases. The data was categorised on the basis of gender, age and ethnicity.
The acquisition will help Snap to grow its location-based analytics technology. Moreover, it recently launched a tool called Snap to Store which, allows the advertisers to know whether their campaigns were able to attract users to physical stores.
Snap has also announced that it will take care of the privacy and security guidelines by establishing a proper separation between Snapchat and Placed.
Placed’s headquarter in Seattle is an important location as Snap has set up their engineering centre there and have plans to expand it on a much larger scale.