The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Veraset is a San Francisco-based location intelligence company that collects, processes and resells raw, device-level GPS location data gathered from thousands of third-party mobile apps and SDKs. Its flagship product, Movement, delivers pseudonymised GPS pings (latitude, longitude, altitude, timestamp and horizontal-accuracy fields) tied to a proprietary device identifier called VAIDR, indexed using both H3 hexagonal grids and Geohash for spatial analysis. Companion datasets include Visits (device visits mapped to a library of more than 4 million points of interest), Home and Work (inferred residential and workplace locations), Trips (origin-destination journeys) and MatchLink (linking device IDs to emails, IP addresses and households). Data is delivered server-to-server as flat files, via API, or through Orchestrator, a self-serve workflow platform the company launched in March 2026 for building repeatable audiences and analyses without custom engineering. What distinguishes Veraset within the alternative-data category is that it sells the raw, disaggregated per-device pings rather than pre-aggregated foot-traffic metrics, leaving the analytics layer to the buyer. Its customer base spans advertising and adtech, retail and real estate site selection, hedge funds and private equity conducting alternative-data research, urban planning consultancies, academic researchers and government agencies; the United Nations is cited on its own site as a user of its data. This raw-data positioning sits upstream of competitors such as its former parent SafeGraph, which focuses on aggregated, privacy-processed foot-traffic analytics rather than individual device trails. Veraset began in 2019 when SafeGraph spun out its device-level data licensing business as a separate company. SafeGraph founder Auren Hoffman has described it as SafeGraph's first spin-out, a roughly ten-million-dollar-ARR, profitable division that he judged was being overlooked inside the larger business. Geoff Prince has led Veraset as CEO. The company states coverage of more than 300 million mobile devices and upwards of 10 billion daily location observations across 200-plus countries. Its data practices have drawn regulatory and press scrutiny: the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented that Veraset gave the Washington, D.C. government free bulk access to device-level GPS data for the city's pandemic-response "Data Lake" program from April to September 2020, before officials declined to renew the arrangement. Veraset publishes a CCPA "do-not-sell" opt-out portal and a GDPR privacy addendum, and states its products are built for GDPR and CCPA compliance. In 2026 Veraset has continued expanding its self-serve tooling, launching the Orchestrator platform in March of that year, and has taken on Datarade as a distribution partner to broaden access to its datasets through that data marketplace.
