The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Unacast is a location intelligence company that turns anonymised mobile device location signals into commercial datasets: foot traffic counts for individual points of interest, device movement and travel patterns, and demographic or behavioral profiles linked to those signals. Its Location Insights Platform gives customers a self-service interface, with generative AI assisted queries, to explore human mobility patterns, and its Data Linkages product connects mobile advertising IDs to hashed emails and IP addresses for identity resolution across campaigns. The company differentiates on data quality process (deduplication and a "forensic flag" style quality-scoring layer across its source panels) and on pairing raw device data with an analytics and business intelligence layer (the Turbine platform) rather than selling data alone. Following its 2024 merger with Gravy Analytics, it markets combined coverage of over 1 billion monthly devices across more than 180 countries, plus Gravy's contextual analytics and a privacy-enhancing technology layer built to strip sensitive-location visits out of datasets. Customers span retail and real estate site selection, advertising and adtech, supply chain and logistics, telecom, insurance, and government and consultancy work; foot-traffic and mobility datasets of this kind are also used as alternative data by financial services researchers studying consumer and retail trends. Unacast was founded in 2014 in Oslo by Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette, who had both previously been part of the founding team at the music-streaming service TIDAL. The company raised a $17.5 million round in February 2018 to launch its data-as-a-service products in the US and a $16 million round in October 2021 to expand into more than 20 additional countries. In November 2023 it announced a merger with Gravy Analytics, a deal that closed in April 2024; the combined company is headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, with offices in Oslo, Norway and Pilsen, Czech Republic. In December 2024 the FTC issued a consent order against Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel for unlawfully selling sensitive location data, including lists of consumers who had visited health-related locations and places of worship; Unacast, which now owns Gravy Analytics, agreed to stop selling such data and told press it had reached an "amicable resolution" with the agency. In December 2025 Unacast secured 28 million dollars in financing from Vector Capital's Vector Velocity direct-credit strategy to fund product development, data expansion, and further acquisitions. The company has said it reached EBITDA-positive operations with double-digit growth in the two years since the Gravy Analytics merger.
