Lifesight, the Singapore-headquartered location intelligence platform, has raised $2 million in pre-series A round, as part of product development and regional expansion plans.
Specialising in artificial intelligence, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider aims to use the additional funding to grow engineering and data science capabilities at its Bangalore development centre, while also expanding into other Asian markets over the next two years.
The investment was led by Provident Capital Partners, a prominent investor in Southeast Asia. Other investments from the Indonesian-based fund include telecommunications, infrastructure, mining, real estate, plantation and biofuels.
Established in 2017, the start-up has shown potential in leveraging its SaaS-based location intelligence platform to help brands, retailers and agencies reach offline consumers and optimise media spend, in a bid to improve business decision-making.
Contributing to the vendor’s growth is also the untapped demand for location intelligence platforms.
“We created Lifesight with the core aim of democratising location intelligence with an easy to use SaaS platform,” Lifesight co-founder and CEO, Tobin Thomas, said. “As long-time players of the APAC [Asia Pacific] marketing and advertising industry, my peers and I often deliberated about the disjointed manner in which digital ads were being served.”
This is a missed opportunity according to Tobin, with outdated attribution models and the need for an ethical, opt-in location intelligence platform to guide business decisions in the region.
From a technology perspective, Lifesight’s main products in the market are Insights and Attribution - which make use of machine learning algorithms and propriety data sets to gain insights into consumers’ offline behaviour.
Insights has been designed to leverage location and transactional-based data to identify connected consumers interests, brand affinity, movement behaviour and purchase intent.
On the other hand, Attribution, was designed to optimise omni-channel digital campaigns based on physical world footfall analysis.
By the end of 2018, 59 per cent of all cloud workflows will be delivered as through SaaS offerings, according to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index for the period 2013-2018.
Therefore, it’s not hard to see why SaaS companies are attractive investments, given that the most successful SaaS vendors are seen to have an annual growth rate of 30 per cent, according to findings.
In many respects, 2018 is set to be a turning point for SaaS vendors.
