Events such as trade shows, concerts and holidays all impact demand for a company’s goods and services. And any MBA student can tell you that companies that don’t properly forecast and price demand will find their businesses upside down. An airline can lose millions of dollars by not optimizing their inventory if they don’t realize there’s a large dental convention next weekend. Ride sharing companies can frustrate their users with long pick up times (potentially leading to churn) when there isn’t enough driver supply after a concert or a baseball game. And hardware manufacturers can miss their quarterly revenue targets when there’s a strike in Europe that disrupts their global supply chain.
Despite the role that Events play in the global economy, there isn’t a single source of truth for global event data.
I hadn’t realized the extent to which real-world events influenced our economy until I sat down with Campbell Brown, Co-founder and CEO of PredictHQ. And after my first whiteboard session with him, I knew I wanted to be in business with him.
Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in PredictHQ’s $10M Series A financing, which was led by our friends at Aspect Ventures with participation from Rampersand VC.
Our partnership with PredictHQ actually started with a reluctant meeting. Admittedly, when I first saw Campbell’s pitch deck, I figured I was taking a courtesy meeting to help another portfolio company, TripActions, gain access to a compelling data source. I wasn’t initially convinced of the magnitude of the opportunity. But, after spending a couple of hours with Campbell, I knew he was an incredibly talented entrepreneur building an important, enduring company — one that will influence business decisions that power the global supply chain.
PredictHQ is building the global source of truth for event data that enterprises can access at any time, via a simple API call.
Now that we are a decade into the data revolution, an incredible amount of ink has been spilled repeating the “Data is the New Oil” mantra. However, today’s state of the art involves analyzing historical data to infer the future. Unfortunately, events are dynamic — conference dates change, school holidays are fluid, concerts come and go and there’s a long tail of local events such as farmer’s markets, strikes, and conventions that are nearly impossible to track.
PredictHQ solves this problem by providing deterministic, accurate data on upcoming events at a granular level, so that global enterprises can forecast and respond to demand at a local level.
Specifically, PredictHQ aggregates more than 2 billion data points to enrich nearly 20 million events across 30,000 cities worldwide into a single API. Customers receive a complete, standardized and enriched dataset that they can use to build forecasting, planning, and marketing applications at scale. Developers use PredictHQ’s API to dynamically adjust services, supply chains, features, messaging and pricing based on real-world events.
Although PredictHQ is still an early stage company, global brands like Uber, Booking.com, Amadeus and Domino’s Pizza have already built applications to access the PredictHQ API for access to real-time event data that helps them drive their business decisions.
Here at Lightspeed we’re extremely excited about our partnership with the PredictHQ team as they democratize programmatic access to event data. With PredictHQ, modern companies can properly forecast demand, scope their global supply chain, and maximize profits. For more information on PredictHQ, visit www.predicthq.com.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He focuses on investments in enterprise IT and infrastructure and sits on the boards of a number of rapidly scaling companies, including Netskope, Qubole, Mist, Split, TripActions, and OverOps. In his free time, Arif plays ice hockey with his wife, who yells at him for never passing the puck to her.
Lightspeed is an early stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors. Lightspeed has backed 300+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap and Nest.
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