- Placer AI - https://www.placer.ai/
Placer.ai is a locational analytics company that recently hit $100M ARR. They work with big box retailers and municipalities to provide insights on consumer trends, behavior and competitive benchmarks. By leveraging different data streams, they can also analyze things like seasonal customer behaviors, migration trends and event performance.
The data they provide comes from a users’ mobile app usage. It’s aggregated statistical information about physical locations, so thankfully it isn’t tied back to specific individuals. They can also use these datasets to estimate employee / resident numbers within specific location to aid businesses / municipalities in decision making.
I’ve been interested in companies that offer similar knowledge hubs. Placer has a million awesome blog posts, trends and data points on their site. Here’s two examples of data I pulled from a Buffalo Wild Wings on the Vegas Strip. It showed daily visits compared to another local bar. I also looked at common visitor stops pre / post Buffalo Wild Wings. Some other data points they had were length of stay, hourly visits, household median income, age, etc.
- Attio - https://attio.com/
Attio is a London born CRM platform. Their product seems nimble enough for a weekend project, but one you’re able to keep if the project were to grow into a massive business. It reminds me of if Notion, Slack and Figma teamed up to make a CRM. (Here's a demo)
The CRM world is dominated by few. It hasn’t gone through the same evolution that other industries have. Startups will work off of spreadsheets for as long as they can. Attio imports your data by either pulling from a CSV, migrating from another CRM or creating new records by syncing with email / calendar. It essentially builds your CRM for you from whichever stage of your journey you’re at.
From there it has custom objects, attributes and associations you can create. Their AI isn’t over the top also. It can pre-analyze context on a lead or company like Job Title, Primary Location, Company Size and Revenue.
Attio’s also starting to compile a solid customer roster: OpenAI, Coca Cola, Bravado, OnDeck. $59 a month, per user would have a team of twenty paying $17,000 annually. Their freemium model seems to have helped market them well, especially across venture funds. They last raised a $23.5M series A in March of 2023. - Strada - https://www.getstrada.com/
Strada is Replit for integrations. They’re an SF based team building a cloud integrated development environment that simplifies the process of building an integration. Their platform handles all of the necessary components like testing, error handling, logging and deployment.
There’s a neat gap that Strada fills with developers who are frustrated with the drag and drop no-code solutions, but also not keen to manage a custom integration / limits as their scale grows. Strada lets developers write integration logic in their preferred programming language and includes a code copilot.
They just released ready-to-launch workflow templates for common problems their customers are solving. Two examples that I found pretty cool were: using AI to analyze the sentiment of Zendesk support ticket and automatically escalating to a slack channel and taking in positive customer messages to a google sheet that marketing can utilize.
-Bryce