Startup Placer.ai, which helps retailers analyze foot traffic at their stores to identify opportunities for business growth, today revealed that it has closed a $100 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation.

The funding round was led by Josh Buckley, chief executive officer of the popular technology website Product Hunt. Several other angel investors participated as well along with a number of institutional backers, including Fifth Wall Ventures and Array Ventures.

Placer.ai previously raised a $50 million Series B round last April. The startup has received a total of $166 million in outside funding to date.

Los Altos, California-based Placer.ai, officially Placer Labs Inc., operates a platform that uses data from more than 50 sources to measure foot traffic at locations such as retail stores. A brick-and-mortar retailer can use the startup’s platform to track how many visitors each of its locations draws per day. With Placer.ai’s data, business users can run analyses to answer questions such as to what extent seasonality impacts sales and whether a marketing campaign prompting a store was successful. 

Identifying opportunities to launch new stores is another use case that Placer.ai targets. According to the startup, the data provided by its platform can help companies more effectively plan retail expansion initiatives. 

The retail sector is just one of several segments where Placer.ai’s platform is used. 

Real-estate companies rely on data from the startup to help them spot investment opportunities. A company seeking to purchase a shopping mall, for example, could use Placer.ai’s platform to find potential acquisition targets and compare the buildings’ foot traffic to identify the most suitable investment. Placer.ai’s customer base also includes a growing number of municipalities, as well as organizations from other areas such as the financial services sector.

The $100 million funding round announced today will enable Placer.ai to build more features for its platform. According to TechCrunch, the startup plans to expand its platform with additional types of data including information on vehicle traffic, real-estate developments and online purchases.

Besides helping with tasks such as identifying store expansion opportunities, the new datasets that the startup plans to add might also enhance its platform’s competitive intelligence features. The platform enables retailers to compare how their stores are faring against those of rivals and track changes in their market share. Companies in other markets can also use Placer.ai’s to monitor the market presence of rivals. 

Placer.ai is the second startup in the location analytics market to have raised funding recently. Previously, CartoDB Inc. last month raised a $61 million funding round led by Insight Partners. CartoDB, better known as Carto, provides a cloud-based platform that enables companies to turn geospatial information such as store sales data into maps for easier analysis and run queries to find useful patterns.

In the adjacent market research software segment, YipitData Inc. recently secured a funding round expected to be worth as much as $475 million when it closes. YipitData provides a platform through which companies can access various types of market data, such as information on competitors’ sales strategies.

Image: Placer.ai