Nick Patrick

DISPATCH — Nick Patrick runs Radar, a New York software company that sells geofencing SDKs and maps APIs to companies you have already given your credit card to. The pitch is unsexy on purpose. Radar is the thing that knows the DoorDash driver has arrived, the thing that quietly checks whether a bettor on a gaming app is standing inside a legal state line, the thing that fires an order-ready ping when you park at Panera. It is location plumbing, and Patrick has spent nine years arguing that plumbing is the point.

The company, which he co-founded in 2016 with Coby Berman, has raised more than $85 million from Accel, Insight Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Expa and Heavybit. It employs about 160 people, does roughly $23.5 million in annual revenue, and processes billions of location events a day across hundreds of millions of devices. Its customers include Panera, DICK's Sporting Goods, T-Mobile and Zillow. Its office is on Fifth Avenue, which Patrick attends in person, on purpose. He thinks that is a competitive advantage. He is willing to say so on podcasts.

The current news, if you want news, is that Patrick has spent the last eighteen months making a public argument in interviews and at industry conferences. The argument is roughly: geolocation used to be an advertising thing, a mildly annoying push notification you got when you walked past a Starbucks, and it was bad. Geolocation is now a product thing - arrival detection, address validation, fraud checks, delivery ETAs, compliance for regulated industries - and it is good. Radar's job, as Patrick tells it, is to be the layer that turns "the user is at a place" into a fact developers can build on top of.

How to happen to Radar

Patrick has a hiring rule that he described on the Not Another CEO podcast last year. It is a little odd, which is why it is worth quoting: "Either people happen to Radar or Radar happens to them. You wanna hire people like they happen to Radar." He wants the first kind. The first kind arrive with things to move; the second kind wait to be told which things.

This is the sort of thing founders say a lot, and it is easy to roll one's eyes at, but there is a rougher, more honest sentence sitting inside it. Patrick has admitted in the same interview that he is "really bad at asking for help." He runs the company like a product manager who took over the whole thing, which he sort of is: the resume is Microsoft PM, Foursquare PM, Handy Senior Director of Product, then CEO. The "people happen to Radar" test is at least partly a founder who is not naturally going to delegate, hiring against his own instinct.

The Foursquare wormhole

Patrick and Berman met at Foursquare in the early 2010s. Patrick was on the product team. Berman was in business development. Foursquare, at that moment, was in an interesting position: the check-in app people remembered was fading, but the location platform underneath it was being sold to enterprises. Patrick was one of the people watching what developers wanted from that platform and what they were not getting. In 2014 he left for Handy, ran product there for two years, and then, in 2016, he and Berman started Radar.

There is a fairly common tech pattern where the best next-generation companies come from the alumni of the previous-generation company that almost got the market right. Foursquare is one of those companies. Radar is one of those exits. The founders had spent enough time inside a location business to know which parts of the problem were actually hard - accuracy, battery, indoor geolocation, geofence rules that don't fire twice - and to build directly for the developers who were tired of being told advertising was the only reason to care.

Series C, and the shift from tailwinds

The last named fundraise was February 2022: a $55 million Series C led by Insight Partners. The blog post announcing it, signed by Patrick, Berman and CTO Tim Julien, contains a line that reads, in hindsight, like a founder trying not to overstate an already-strong hand:

Since then Patrick has spent his public appearances arguing for a shift in how people think about location. On PYMNTS in 2024, he said geolocation "has shifted from being more advertising-centric to more product-centric" - a boring sentence with enormous implications for anyone whose business depends on knowing where someone is. At ICE Barcelona in early 2025 he made a version of the same argument aimed at regulated gaming, which is required to verify that bettors are physically inside legal jurisdictions, and which he thinks does not appreciate how much better location tech has gotten.

Middle-school computers, a Pokémon fan site, a plan to be a biologist

Patrick grew up in Maryland, in a family with a father in petroleum sales and a stay-at-home mother. He calls himself a computer nerd. In middle school he built PCs. He also built a Pokémon fan site called, gloriously, "the Pokemon Lab." He arrived at Duke intending to become a computational biologist, aiming eventually at a PhD, and then discovered that computational biology involves a lot of actual biology. He hated the lab. He pivoted to computer science, finished the CS degree in 2009, and later did an MBA at Harvard, finishing in 2013.

The route to Radar was: Microsoft first, as a program manager on a very large team working on a very small piece of a product; Foursquare after Harvard; Handy after Foursquare; and then, in 2016, out on his own. It is a very product-manager path to founding a company. It also explains a lot about how Radar is built. The company sells to engineers, defers to developer experience, and treats maps and geocoding as things that should have documentation, uptime and pricing, not a sales call.

The 4 AM shift

Patrick wakes at 4 a.m. He is married to a physician. They have two young children. The early hour is not a productivity flex; it is the last quiet window before the day belongs to other people. He cooks. He answers email. He works on the product. Then the meetings start, and he protects weekends for family. It is unromantic, and it is also mostly what running a 160-person company looks like when the CEO is also trying to be present at home.

He believes, publicly and repeatedly, that in-person work makes his company better. This is a live debate in tech. Patrick's position is not sentimental. He runs a New York office, defends it, and has been recognized on Built In's 50 Best Startups to Work For in NYC and Crain's top-10 best-places lists. Neither of those is a Nobel Prize. Both are evidence that whatever he is doing with the office is not repelling people.

What the plumbing looks like

Radar's product line has widened considerably since 2016. It started as a geofencing SDK - a way for a mobile app to fire an event when a user entered or left a defined polygon on a map. It now sells maps APIs, geocoding, address autocomplete and validation, routing with live ETAs, trip tracking, an analytics dashboard, GPS spoofing detection, and, more recently, geo-compliance tools for regulated industries. Panera uses the platform to fire order-ready pings when customers arrive. DICK's uses it for in-store fulfillment. Zillow uses it for tour arrival detection. T-Mobile uses it in ways T-Mobile doesn't usually explain in public.

The technical stack, gleaned from the company's public engineering surface, leans on the current standard: React and React Native on the front end, Node.js and Rust on the back end, MongoDB and Redis for state, Kubernetes on AWS, Airflow for pipelines, and Anthropic Claude and Cursor in the internal tooling. The company runs OpenStreetMap-based base maps as a Google Maps alternative, which is a small but meaningful part of its pitch to developers who are tired of the incumbent's pricing.

The invisible layer

The most useful thing to know about Patrick is that he is running a company you have almost certainly never seen the logo of, which touches your phone, in small quiet ways, more often than you think. This is a choice. There are founders who want the magazine cover. There are founders who want to be inside a hundred million devices. Patrick is in the second group. The interviews he gives are with developer podcasts and industry press. The customer logos are enterprise. The story is: build the layer, keep it up, add products, don't take the ad-tech shortcut, hire people who happen to Radar rather than the other way around.

Nine years in, that story has produced a company with real revenue, real customers, and a defensible position in a category - location - that is only becoming more product-critical as commerce keeps blurring the digital and the physical. Whether Radar becomes the Stripe of location, which is roughly the framing Patrick would like, or a good sub-industry standard acquired by someone bigger, is a question the next few years answer. In the meantime the founder wakes up at four, cooks, ships, defends the office, and keeps quoting the sentence about people happening to things.