Sense360

Founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur Eli Portnoy and technologist Kamil Mroczek, Sense360 developed a data insights platform to analyze consumer behavior. Portnoy, with a background from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School, had previously founded and sold Thinknear, a location-based advertising company. This experience in leveraging mobile data informed Sense360's core mission.

The company's primary offering was a self-service insights platform that provided a comprehensive view of consumer behavior, particularly for the restaurant and retail industries. By collecting and analyzing billions of anonymized data points from smartphone sensors, location data, transactions, and surveys, Sense360 offered its clients real-time intelligence. This allowed businesses to understand foot traffic, competitive landscapes, and the effectiveness of marketing promotions. The platform was designed to answer critical business questions, such as what drives traffic, where growth opportunities lie, and which competitors are gaining market share.

Sense360's business model was centered on providing this data through subscription-based access to its dashboards and analytics tools. Clients included major restaurant chains, convenience stores, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. The company raised a total of $13.3 million over three funding rounds, with a notable Series A round of $7 million in 2017 led by FirstMark.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Medallia, a global leader in experience management, in September 2020 for approximately $44 million. The acquisition was driven by the potential to combine Sense360's real-time consumer intelligence with Medallia's customer experience platform, offering a more holistic view of the customer journey. Following the acquisition, the platform became known as Sense360 by Medallia.

Keywords: consumer intelligence, market research, data analytics, customer behavior, foot traffic analysis, retail insights, restaurant analytics, competitive intelligence, mobile data, consumer insights, data-as-a-service, location data, transaction data, survey data, behavioral data, customer journey analysis, market share analysis, brand performance, Medallia, Eli Portnoy