Near nabs $100 million for big data insights into people and places

Near, an AI-powered platform that crunches mobility data from 1.6 billion devices globally to deliver insights on human behavior, has raised $100 million in a series D round of funding from Greater Pacific Capital (GPC).Founded in 2012, Near pools datasets from myriad third-party sources, including data aggregators, app developers, public Wi-Fi hotspots, censuses, and more. It then applies analytics to help companies, such as brands, enterprises, publishers, or marketers, determine behavioral attributes of people in the real world. Near said that it develops its own AI and machine learning models in-house, which it uses to help cleanse data, remove noise, and automate audience curation through understanding the users query. Near offers a couple of core products  Carbon, which is a data-enrichment offering that companies can use to enhance their own digital data with real-world attributes. And then there is its flagship software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering called Allspark, a marketing automation tool that allows marketers to visualize and analyze the dynamics of their target audience around location, demographics, interests, and more. This can be used to inform their various campaigns, or carry out a competitor analysis, while it can also help them measure the