xAd Rebrands to Stress Broader Focus

Location technology firm xAd has changed its name to GroundTruth, reflecting its 'evolution from a company focused on the advertising industry to a company empowering businesses through media and data'.

The company's proprietary Blueprints technology maps behaviour in the real world, 'seeing more people and places than anyone else', boasting a first-party database of 17 million active daily users across 100 million places and points of interest.

The firm announced it had secured $42.5m in funding and acquired weather data specialist WeatherBug in November last year, at the same time appointing former comScore CEO Serge Matta as its President of Global Sales and Marketing. It has grown rapidly in the last twelve months, extending operations to 21 countries and ramping up its monitoring of physical visits to places by a factor of 80, to one billion worldwide per month. It also now receives data from two out of three US smartphone owners.

The rebrand marks its expansion from an advertising supplier to a firm 'powering decisions across a variety of industries and pillars'. One new growth area is advising companies on using foot traffic data to make more strategic investments - for example helping retail brands with store planning or predicting routes in order to maximize billboard viewership.

CEO Dipanshu 'D' Sharma (pictured) comments: 'The name xAd was too limiting for our business. The power of location data doesn't have to be limited to media and can be realized in other applications from real estate, traffic and out-of-home planning to layering in weather to determine its impact on visits, something we recognized after acquiring WeatherBug. As GroundTruth, we're able to realize our ambitions beyond media'. CMO Monica Ho adds: 'What we've found is that location goes far beyond helping to increase sales or store visits through ads. It can actually move markets, drive innovation and even save lives'.

Web site: www.groundtruth.com .