Business Data Firm Dataplor Doubles Funding To Date

California-based Dataplor, which collates data on business locations worldwide, has raised $10.6m in a Series A funding round, with which to accelerate its ongoing expansion and make a number of strategic hires.

The company was founded by current CEO Geoffrey Michener (pictured) in 2016, and has since compiled more than 300 million point of interest (POI) records on over 15,000 brands in more than 200 countries and territories. Data includes physical location, hours, contact information, credit card acceptance and consumer sentiment. Dataplor also trains tens of thousands of people it calls Explorers, to validate the data online.

The round was led by Spark Capital, whose General Partner Alex Finkelstein will join Dataplor's board of directors. Other participants in the funding were Quest Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, Circadian Ventures, Two Lanterns Venture Partners and APA Venture Partners. To data the firm has raised a total of $20.3m.

Explaining his business to publisher techcrunch.com, Michener said: 'Company 10-Ks are always six months late, so it's hard to know if a company, for example, Starbucks, what their open or close rates are. Other companies also want to know if one of their competitors closed or what the other businesses around there [are] so they can see if they can put a location there. We are trying to empower their decision-making'.

The company is online at www.dataplor.com .