Helping Developers Build Privacy-Friendly, Location-Powered Experiences Across iOS, Android, and the Web
By Dan Abelon, Frances Schwiep, and Mickey Graham
When it comes to the device we keep by our side 90% of the time, we have very little understanding of the location-related context of our smartphones. To be sure, certain companies have found success by taking advantage of the inherently mobile nature of our devices by adding location-based features — think Yelp showing nearby restaurants, Google Maps showing your GPS coordinates, or Uber & Lyft connecting you to nearby drivers — but this is a challenging engineering and data management problem for developers at large, especially at scale and across a growing number platforms.
Companies who want to offer context-aware situations — for example, imagine a grocery chain being able to show their most recent deals when a customer enters a store — have to dedicate multiple engineers and ongoing development resources to the project, often troubleshooting through updates and new versions of each new iOS and Android release. Frustrating the problem, solution providers in this market have historically been dominated by AdTech companies and data monetization companies or resellers, who aren’t afraid to hold your users’ data hostage for pricing leverage, or to sell your customers’ data behind your back. Simply put, we’ve found there is a lack of easy-to-use and privacy-oriented platforms that enable developers to add location-based awareness and functionality to their mobile applications, which is why we were so excited when we met Radar.
Radar is a modern, privacy-first solution that allows mobile application developers to build location-powered experiences on any platform, including iOS, Android, and web. Radar does this by enabling mobile app developers to start generating events based on geofences, places, and insights with a few lines of code, with a dedication to privacy. Unlike other players in the space, Radar is not building any AdTech offerings, thereby aligning their privacy-first approach with the growing security demands developers face in a post GDPR world. Their focus is on empowering developers to easily create better location-tailored experiences, while ultimately making it simple for companies to put privacy back into the hands of their end users.
Founded by Nick Patrick and Coby Berman who met while working at Foursquare, Radar is already trusted by leading companies such as Walmart, Burger King, trivago, and others. Someday soon, we believe that every mobile application will be powered by a new, modern infrastructure stack comprising of an analytics tool, a marketing automation tool, a customer data platform, and now, a location context platform (Radar). It’s an exciting glimpse into what the future of mobile infrastructure could look like, and it’s just the beginning.
We’re beyond thrilled to be partnering with the team making that future a reality, and we’re excited to announce that we’re leading Radar’s $8M Series A financing, with participation from our friends at Accel and Heavybit, along with Scott Belsky (Behance Founder and Adobe Chief Product Officer), and Ashley Smith (the former VP of Marketing at GitHub). Congrats to the whole team on the milestone. We’re super excited about this next chapter for Radar.
