Deal focus: Greater Pacific to help Near monetize data points

Greater Pacific Capital, an Asia-focused private equity firm based in the UK, sees enterprise analytics as an area where growth in the East will do more than provide an opportunity set for global investors seeking new markets. In this case, it will change the very way global markets work. 

This viewpoint breaks down much of the macro logic behind Greater Pacific’s latest investment in Singapore-based number cruncher Near. The GP committed $100 million to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) player with a view to launching a suite of products on an existing platform – and entrenching a presence across 20 countries that is already relied on by the likes of News Crop, MetLife, and Mastercard.   

“We see Near as an innovator that turns billions of data points into value and delivers it efficiently through a self-service SaaS delivery platform. We see an emerging trend in such companies coming from Asia, catering to a global client base,” says Ketan Patel, CEO of Greater Pacific. “In the future, the company’s platform will enable its partners to create new propositions based on linking people, places and the broader factors that drive people’s choices, and it will do this across international boundaries.”

Near was founded in 2012 with a focus on informing business decisions by tracking people’s behavior in the physical world, including actions such as movements between locations and transaction histories. The company, which has incorporated artificial intelligence into this process, claims to have the largest database globally of real-world behavior intelligence. This platform is said to track 1.6 billion people and process some five billion events per day. 

Audience curation and marketing automation are the focus of its flagship product, known as Allspark. The idea is to enable brands and enterprises to visualize and analyze audience location, behavior, demography and other specialized data to power strategy, marketing and operations. Users can also compare the digital and real-world interests of the people being tracked, allowing them to fine-tune their targeting.

Anil Mathews, founder and CEO of the company said recently that the product had “scaled its SaaS revenues faster than anything we have historically seen.” 

Another ingredient to the success, and a key factor for Greater Pacific, has been the company’s privacy policy. It is compliant with EU data privacy regulation and claims to never store or deal with data that is classified as personally identifiable information.

“Privacy is an important go or no-go criteria for any data-driven tech investment,” Patel explains. “The privacy environment and regulatory constructs are still evolving so it is not only important that companies are privacy compliant today but also that they are privacy-by-design. Near’s aim is to build a privacy-by-design data platform that evolves with the changing worldview of privacy.”   

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Singapore
• TMT
• Greater Pacific Capital