While startups of a certain vintage have typically been through at least one transformational pivot, in the case of Singapore-headquartered B2B SaaS platform Near, its vision has remained the same since it began a decade ago.
At the recently-concluded Asia PE-VC Summit 2021, Near co-founder and president Shobhit Shukla spoke about why the data intelligence platform was arguably more relevant to a wider range of industries and businesses than ever before. Shukla was in conversation with FactorDaily co-founder and journalist Pankaj Mishra.
Near, which has been expanding via M&As and organically, says it aggregates anonymised data on 1.6 billion monthly users across 70 million places and is leveraged by 2 out of 3 Fortune 500 businesses. Near has raised $134 million from marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital, JP Morgan, Telstra and Cisco and has a presence across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Some of Near’s recent acquisitions include the Paris-based location intelligence platform Teemo that allows the firm to crack the European market and offer advanced data intelligence products and California-based UM that provides mobile location data and intelligence.
Edited excerpts of the fireside chat with Shobhit Shukla:-
