SafeGraph, a data-as-a-service company focused on being the source of truth for data on physical places, announced today a $45 million Series B fundraise, led by Sapphire Ventures.

This investment follows a year of incredible growth for SafeGraph. While the market for accurate geospatial data was already accelerating pre-pandemic, the unique challenges posed by COVID-19 led many organizations to rely heavily on places data. SafeGraph’s points of interest and mobility datasets proved invaluable to organizations looking to understand how local landscapes continue to change, and how this impacted behaviors such as travel, leisure and shopping. During these uncertain times, many organizations such as Ares Management, Sysco and Choice Hotels have turned to SafeGraph as a truth set for the physical world.

In response to the impact of the pandemic, SafeGraph created a community of more than 7,000 data scientists who have been collaborating on numerous geospatial projects, resulting in over 300 academic papers published featuring data from SafeGraph and coverage from data journalists at major news outlets such as USA Today, Fortune and the Washington Post. During this time, SafeGraph doubled its year-over-year revenue while improving efficiency metrics, such as revenue per employee.

Over the past year, SafeGraph saw accelerated demand for places data among its traditional customer segments, including retail and GIS technology providers. As consumer demand and behavior shifted dramatically during the pandemic, the greatest increase in demand has come from the logistics industry. “From the beginning of our data sourcing process, SafeGraph provided the most comprehensive and actionable POI dataset,” said Ben Anderson, Senior Manager of Market, Customer, and Competitive Intelligence at Sysco. “Their coverage of the top 1,000 restaurants is unmatched and invaluable.”

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“We’re incredibly excited to partner with Cathy Gao and the Sapphire Ventures team,” said SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman. “Cathy brings a wealth of knowledge to the table that will be invaluable while navigating and discovering new markets of data buyers. And Sapphire has deep experience in investing in data businesses. Their team understands what it takes to build category-defining companies.”

With this investment, SafeGraph plans to capitalize on the expanding market of data buyers and offer new ways for customers to buy data. As the market for places data increases, customer needs become more diverse. SafeGraph plans to adapt its model to meet these new demands. Through a growing partner network, new data delivery mechanisms and international expansion, SafeGraph will enable all interested parties to access the exact data they need, wherever they need it.

Multiple investors from previous funding rounds also participated in this Series B. Those include Alex Rosen of Ridge Ventures, DNX Ventures, and Peter Thiel. Investors are attracted to SafeGraph because they believe the company is well-positioned to lead a growing industry.

“What stands out about SafeGraph is how they’ve been able to quickly position themselves into a major player in the geospatial data industry,” said Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures. “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. The efficient growth to-date is a strong indicator of where we think the company is going and Auren’s track record of building consequential data businesses speaks for itself.”

Today, SafeGraph offers business listing, foot traffic and building polygon data for the United States and Canada, with a United Kingdom launch planned for April of 2021. With this Series B funding, SafeGraph intends to become the source of truth for data on all physical places in the world.

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