Data Startup SafeGraph Raises $45M Months After Moving to Denver

by Gordon Gottsegen
March 16, 2021
SafeGraph team photo
Photo: SafeGraph

On Tuesday, spatial data startup SafeGraph announced the closing of its $45 million Series B funding round, which was led by Sapphire Ventures.

This new funding follows a year of growth for the company, as more customers relied on SafeGraph’s data-as-a-service offering.

The company aims to be a one-stop shop for data about physical places. This means mapping out millions of point-of-interest locations and providing relevant information about those places. For example, SafeGraph can show you data about a specific Starbucks including its street address, coordinates on a map, business hours, what company owns it, relevant tags and so on.

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Beyond researching Starbucks locations, this data can point to some interesting trends on a macro level. Organizations including Ares Management, Sysco and Choice Hotels have used SafeGraph to learn more about local landscapes, and how businesses are affected by people’s behaviors and change over time.

This spatial data has been in greater demand over the past year. To meet that demand, SafeGraph created a community of over 7,000 data scientists to work on numerous geospatial projects. This data has been used in more than 300 published academic papers, and has been referenced in various journalistic projects. For example, USA Today used the company’s data to show which states have the most Americans sheltering in place. The Washington Post used SafeGraph data to show which retail brands have been hit the hardest by COVID-19.

This year of heightened demand was capped off by another major milestone for SafeGraph. In 2020, the company officially moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Denver. While many startups left SF to move to Denver last year, SafeGraph had its own reasons for doing so. The company’s number of employees based in SF was shrinking, it had a handful of executives who were already based in Colorado, it saw Colorado as a friendlier state to businesses, Bay Area prices were too expensive ... the list goes on.

This new funding round will help the company grow after planting its new roots. It plans to invest in new market strategies and expand in order to meet growing demand. The company also plans to launch new data products in the United Kingdom in April of 2021.

“What stands out about SafeGraph is how they’ve been able to quickly position themselves into a major player in the geospatial data industry,” Cathy Gao, a partner at investor Sapphire Ventures, said in a statement. “By singularly focusing on providing the highest-quality places data to data science teams, they’ve earned the trust of some of the largest public and private institutions.”

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