location-intelligence
(8)
Vlad Baskakov
Vlad Baskakov is the co-founder and CEO of VOYGR (YC W26), a San Francisco startup building real-world place intelligence for AI apps and agents. He spent years on Google Maps leading product strategy and go-to-market for places and local advertising, and worked in ridesharing and travel at Gett and OYO before that. A McKinsey alum with a Harvard MBA, he is now betting that AI agents need a maps API that knows not just that a restaurant is 'open till 10,' but whether the chef left and the locals moved on.
Kurt Dobbins
Kurt Dobbins is the founder and CEO of Nrby, a New Hampshire company building AI-driven predictive network intelligence for broadband and telecom operators. A serial entrepreneur and networking engineer with more than three decades in the industry, he previously founded Ellacoya Networks (acquired by Arbor Networks) and Deep Information Sciences, and earlier served as technical director at Cabletron Systems. He is the named inventor on more than a dozen networking and communications patents and describes himself as a lifelong builder of ideas that challenge convention and reshape industries.
Tom Laband
Tom Laband is the co-founder and CEO of Adsquare, a Berlin-born location-intelligence company he started in 2012 with Sebastian Doerfel and Fritz Richter. Adsquare runs a neutral data exchange that turns consented location signals into audience data for programmatic advertising, and Laband has spent more than a decade arguing that location is a durable, privacy-compliant alternative to the crumbling world of online identifiers. A University of Mannheim graduate who cut his teeth in early European mobile advertising at YOC and Sevenval, he now splits his attention between the company's Berlin engineering base and its commercial push in New York.
Georgios Pipelidis
Georgios Pipelidis is the co-founder and CEO of Ariadne, a Munich-born company that turns the anonymous radio signals leaking from smartphones into privacy-first analytics about how people move through airports, stores and stations - no cameras, no apps, no network connection required. A computer scientist with a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Technical University of Munich, he turned an academic project on indoor positioning - one that beat Google, IBM, Samsung, Cisco and Sony at a 2018 global competition - into a company operating sensors in hundreds of locations worldwide, backed by a $7M Series A.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Noam Ben-Zvi
Noam Ben-Zvi is the co-founder and CEO of Placer.ai, the location intelligence platform that turns anonymized phone movement into hard numbers for retailers, landlords, and city planners. He sold his first company, BlueTail, to Salesforce in 2012, then started Placer in 2016. By 2024 the company crossed $100M ARR and raised at a $1.5B valuation.
Gary Little
Gary Little is President and CEO of Foursquare, the world's leading independent location technology platform. A rare operator-investor hybrid, he spent six years running internet monetization at Yahoo, then pivoted into investment banking at Credit Suisse, Lazard, and UBS before co-founding Buckthorn Partners and rising to Managing Director at The Raine Group. At Raine he led the $150M Foursquare investment and negotiated the company's transformative acquisitions of Placed and Factual - then stepped into the CEO seat himself in January 2021. Under his leadership, Foursquare has evolved from a nostalgic social check-in app into the dominant infrastructure layer for location intelligence, covering 190 countries, indexing over 200 million points of interest, and powering the geospatial stacks of enterprises across retail, advertising, real estate, and urban planning.
Sath Nelakonda
Sath Nelakonda is the CEO and CTO of Cinarra Systems, a SoftBank company that turns mobile network signals into privacy-safe advertising and venue analytics. A co-founder of the company since 2013, he came out of the deep plumbing of the internet - IP/MPLS routing at TiMetra, then Alcatel-Lucent, then Juniper - and now runs an ad-tech outfit built on telco-grade data.