Ariadne Maps, an analytics platform built to assist physical businesses, just grabbed €2 million in a seed round led by Marathon Venture Capital. The company founded by Greek entrepreneurs and with offices in Greece, Germany, and the US plans to use the funds to support the growing demand for its technology and expand its offering, with a focus on privacy. EIT Digital, Sasya Terra and angel investor Raoul Oberman also joined the round.
Leveraging research in the location technologies space
The startup was the product of a research collaboration between Greek founders CEO Georgios Pipelidis and CTO Nikos Tsiamitros, during their time at the Technical University of Munich. Their findings on precise location technologies for the physical world were recognized at industry-renowned conferences and competitions, in a competitive space that included IBM, Cisco and Google.
In 2019, Ariadne Maps was launched to support a wide range of organizations with intelligence on how people move to optimize asset use and customer experience. For a long time, physical businesses such as airports, train stations, or retail stores have lagged behind digital companies in terms of real-time analytics. Ariadne Maps set out to fill in this gap, announced Georgios Pipelidis, company co-founder and CEO.
So what type of insights can customers get from Ariadne Maps? The technology behind captures signals from smartphones (such as GSM, wifi, Bluetooth) through devices installed in designated locations and AI algorithms. Via a modern interface, customers then receive traffic analytics such as the number of unique visitors per day, heatmaps, the trajectory of unique visitors, as well as predictions based on the data. As a result, companies can understand customer behavior, detect patterns, and make better decisions to improve the business.
The company ensures that no personal information is ever retrieved, placing privacy concerns at the heart of the solution with GDPR-compliant tracking.
Already, physical businesses all over the world are using Ariadne Maps, from airports in Glasgow and Singapore, to train stations in Chicago and Germany, and IKEA retail stores in different countries.
“Ariadne Maps is reimagining the analytics layer of the physical world,” announced George Tziralis, Partner at Marathon Venture Capital, the key investor in this round. To real estate operators, Ariadne brings access to a wide range of capabilities straight from the box, real-time monitoring tools, and the opportunity to unlock unique insights.
With the fresh capital, the company aims to expand the team, accelerate product development, and boost its marketing and sales efforts in order to gain further market share.
“As far as the Greek startup ecosystem is concerned, the team will be hiring for a number of roles in Greece in the upcoming months for people that love working at the intersection of AI and real-world applications, as they grow their team across Greece, Germany and remotely,” Alex Alexakis, Analyst at Marathon Venture Capital, tells The Recursive.
The timing for expanding the company’s portfolio is right. As the world reopens after the pandemic, businesses will compete on providing a great visitor experience. Moreover, consumer data privacy concerns are a persistent trend in recent years, fuelled by the proliferation of social networking services.
