InfoScout Raises $5m and Launches Shopper Analytics

Mobile-focused retail market research provider InfoScout has raised $5m in a Series A round of funding from dunnhumby Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Founder Collective. The company has also launched the public beta of its 'freemium' consumer shopping analytics service.

Based in San Francisco, the firm offers a mobile app which aims to understand purchase behavior by capturing panelists' till receipts from 40,000 shopping trips per day, and provides a platform through which users answer trip-specific surveys about the items they've purchased. After this, InfoScout's technology converts the receipt images and survey responses into purchase data associated with products and retailers, to help understand purchasing decisions at the household level and gain insight into both the demographic and psychographic profiles of customers.

The new consumer shopping analytics service bases results on more than 125,000 panelists and five million shopping trips.

Dave Balter (pictured) of dunnhumby Ventures - which itself was launched in September by retail analytics giant dunnhumby to support companies in the consumer data arena - comments: 'We're excited by the opportunity to help InfoScout bring the advanced capabilities of the web analytics industry to real-world brick-and-mortar retail. The comprehensive scale of their data and freemium business model will be completely disruptive to the retail market research industry as we know it.'

Web site: www.infoscout.co .