How GeoIQ harnesses real-world data to build location-based intelligence

Understanding your local area and knowing its demographics is critical to building a successful business. Location-based intelligence like distance radius, drivetime polygons, and location-based customer information can give businesses a significant edge over their competition. However, critical data such as this is scattered and unstructured and businesses are yet to leverage its full potential.

Here’s where Bengaluru-based startup GeoIQ comes into play. Addressing the market’s need for reliable data-led decision-making, a team of data scientists led by Devashish Fuloria, Ankita Thakur and Tusheet Shrivastava founded GeoIQ. GeoIQ is a leading location intelligence platform that leverages its AI and ML capabilities to provide critical information regarding locations, people, their behaviours, businesses, and their potential. The company’s machine learning engine identifies the ‘why’ behind the ‘where’, thus unlocking patterns in business data.

"GeoIQ has been formed with an aim to introduce businesses to real-world data and solve some of their pressing problems with location intelligence. We help businesses harness this otherwise non-consumable data that lies external to the organisation and draw actionable insights around user behavior at the street level. Some of the problems that we are solving are around credit risk prediction, claim propensity, retail expansion, hyperlocal targeting, lead prioritization, fraud prediction, and much more," said Devashish Fuloria, Co-founder and CEO, GeoIQ.

Aspiring to be the go-to platform for predicting hyper-local business performance across geographies, this startup aims to quantify each location’s risks and opportunities for businesses to operate efficiently. GeoIQ is an enabler assisting businesses in unlocking their innate strengths and operating in a highly competitive business environment.

It also offers real-time solutions to help optimise resources, costs, and processes, and maximise ROI, revenue and profit. This game-changing platform also assists in visualising sales, identifying the target groups, critically evaluating the potential customers, and estimating the ROI in real-time, enabling the clients to strengthen their competitive positioning.

GeoIQ essentially creates a user geo-identity that revolves around factors impacting the business use case with information such as users’ access to financial hubs, affluence, real estate infrastructure, key businesses in their location, and more street-level intelligence. India has 350 million unique hyperlocal grids, 2000+ differentiating variables, and 600+ data sources that include government sources, satellite imagery, listings, maps, etc. GeoIQ has already created geo-identities for nearly 7 billion users in India.

What GeoIQ offers

The platform offers three products – explorer, NoCode ML, and Data APIs. Explorer provides hyperlocal insights in real-time. This information is made available in one click for thousands of pre-defined GeoIQ attributes. All you need to do is to input a location as an address or a latitude/longitude coordinate and select the relevant attributes for which you need information. The attributes could be around demography, socio-economic factors, infrastructure, healthcare, crime data, and much more. You can select from 3000+ attributes listed in the data catalog.

The NoCode ML platform is a sophisticated solution backed with machine learning and data science capabilities. It is the first automated ML platform with an in-built feature store. Businesses can build multiple models without the need to code and in no time. They can test these models on various attribute sets and select the one that works best for them. It provides near real-time location insights for catchments with granularity as high as 100m X 100m.

The APIs can be easily integrated into existing codes for providing location insights and ultrafast data APIs and AI for fine-grained customer data augmentation.

Meet the founding team

Devashish Fuloria, Founder and CEO, GeoIQ, is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and holds a Ph.D. from Imperial College London (class of 2009). He was also the co-founder of ZeLadder Sports and a sports writer at Cricinfo, which reflects his diversified interests. With over 15 years of experience in the development and consulting of data-driven products, he aims at solving complex data problems with the simplest solutions for users.

Ankita Thakur, the co-founder and CDO, is a data science expert and has worked with Oyo, MuSigma, and HSBC previously. With over 11 years of experience across geospatial, retail, BFSI and hospitality domains, she excels at building data solutions for complex industry problems and analytics needs. Her expertise is diversified in R, Python, and Spark with a deep understanding of statistical techniques.

Tusheet Srivastava, the other co-founder and CTO, is also an IITian. He has previously worked with Global Analytics, HT Media, and OnlineTyari. He is a Machine Learning expert and specialises in building complex ML algorithms, Recommender Systems, end-to-end data products, and large-scale high-volume data systems.

On a growth trajectory

While the products can be used across varied industries, GeoIQ has made its mark specifically in the retail and BFSI sectors. It has already collaborated with some of India’s fast-growing brands like NAVI, Paytm, HeroFinCorp, DMI Finance, Zepto, Lenskart among others. With GeoIQ’s unique offerings, its fintech clients have witnessed a 10 percent reduction in NPAs with better risk profiling and a 20 percent increase in book size. E-commerce clients witnessed a 20 percent reduction in returns and fraud.

GeoIQ is on a growth trajectory with 0.5 million hits per day and USD 1 million ARR in 2022. The company is targeting USD 5 million ARR in the current financial year. The startup has achieved 10X ARR growth previously and is currently at 5X ARR growth. GeoIQ plans to expand its global footprint in the US market besides other countries.

The platform has already garnered strong investor support from 9Unicorns, Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal, Inflection Point Ventures, Lalit Keshre, (CEO, Groww), Pravin Jadhav (ex-CEO Paytm Money), Shamik Sharma (ex-CPO Myntra), and Amit Bhor (CPO, Capital Float). Lenskart has also invested USD 2 million in the pre-Series A funding.

The startup is evolving as a leader in the AI-based location intelligence space and is currently in the hyper-adoption stage. There is unlimited potential in real-world data and GeoIQ is destined to be the game changer. The lean team of high performers are redefining how organisations use real-world and alternate data across the world and are shaping the future of data analytics across industries.