Ubimo gave the billboard a better question: who went shopping?

Consider a billboard beside a supermarket. Someone passes it, enters the shop and buys groceries. The advertiser would like to take a bow. But the shopper may have been going there anyway. The billboard has enjoyed excellent company; whether it has earned its fee is another matter. This little ambiguity sits at the center of Ubimo’s story.

Ubimo, a Quotient brand, built tools for connecting the places people go with the advertising they encounter. Its work spans audience research, media buying and measurement. The interesting part is the movement between them: a location signal can help choose a screen, inform a campaign and test whether store visitation changed afterward. The street becomes something a planner can interrogate.

A phone knows the weather, too

Ubimo’s four founders were Ran Ben-Yair, Oded Poncz, Gilad Amitai and Udi Graff. Ben-Yair, Poncz and Graff had previously helped build LabPixies, acquired by Google in 2010. By 2013, their new venture was pursuing mobile advertising with a particular interest in context. A coordinate was a beginning. Weather, nearby businesses and local events could make that coordinate useful.

Imagine the difference between reaching someone near a stadium and reaching someone near a stadium on game day. That illustrates the product’s early logic. Ubimo layered real-world signals into a self-service platform for programmatic buying: software that buys advertising inventory through automated transactions. Its customer was the marketer or agency, paying to turn context into a better media decision.

Ubimo raised $7.5 million in May 2015, reported as Series B. Pitango led, with OurCrowd and YJ Capital participating. The money supported expansion. Another practical concern surfaced that December: an ad bought inside an app still needed to be viewable. Ubimo and DoubleVerify worked together on independent in-app viewability measurement.

The map becomes the product

In September 2017, Ubimo introduced Polaris. The emphasis widened from buying mobile ads to letting organizations explore location intelligence themselves. Customers could combine their own data with outside datasets, build audiences, examine visitation patterns and produce competitive reports. The DSP remained inside the offering. Buying media became one use of a larger analytical system.

At launch, Ben-Yair contrasted Polaris with “black box” data models. This was a promise of control: clients could investigate their own questions rather than receive a finished segment and accept its pedigree on faith. Ubimo said its DSP had already served more than 250 brands. That was a historical claim.

Outdoor advertising made an especially concrete application. Clear Channel Outdoor launched RADARView in May 2018, powered by Polaris. Advertisers could explore outdoor inventory against behavioral audiences, demographics and locations. Clear Channel described consented, aggregated and anonymized data. Ubimo was selling the intelligence behind the selection of physical advertising space, rather than owning the billboards themselves.

The supermarket was already popular

The awkward question returned in 2019. Ubimo’s self-service outdoor attribution product addressed a measurement problem the company described plainly: traditional approaches could favor devices producing more location signals and overstate the impact of ads near shops. Proximity was liable to flatter the advertiser. A busy supermarket does not become an advertising triumph merely because somebody installed a screen outside.

Ubimo’s stated method matched exposed and control devices on characteristics including signal patterns, demographics and behavior, then compared visitation lift before and during the campaign. JCDecaux North America was a named user. The appeal was practical: media owners could produce reports themselves and explain campaign performance to brands. Foot traffic became a testable outcome, though a visit still did not establish a purchase.

The distinction matters when using any such tool. A marketer needs a credible comparison group, sufficiently reliable location signals and a defined outcome. If those inputs are weak, the resulting lift deserves less confidence. This is an inference from the measurement design, not a claim that Ubimo experienced a particular failure. The transferable lesson is to question the comparison before admiring the percentage.

Kinetic’s 2019 partnership added audience data to outdoor planning and measurement. In an earlier Polaris announcement, Kinetic strategist Michael Lieberman observed that location was “still only one type of data point about a consumer.” That restraint is useful. A map can tell you where behavior occurred; other information must help explain why it matters.

“Still only one type of data point about a consumer.”Michael Lieberman · Kinetic N.A. · 2017

A customer buys the machinery

Quotient announced its agreement to acquire Ubimo in November 2019, after working with the company for several years. The attraction included the DSP and faster development of self-service campaign tools. Quotient wanted marketers to plan, buy and optimize within an automated platform, with Ubimo’s technology combined with its shopper data. An existing customer had decided to bring the machinery inside.

The acquisition closed on November 19. A subsequent SEC filing recorded $20.7 million in acquisition-date consideration: $15 million cash plus contingent consideration valued at $5.7 million. The contractual contingent payment ceiling was $24.8 million, dependent on financial metrics. These are different numbers with different jobs; the ceiling should not be mistaken for money actually paid.

Ubimo occupied an intersection of enterprise software, geospatial analytics and advertising. Alternatives included other buying platforms and location intelligence providers; Vistar Media offered overlapping outdoor capabilities while also integrating with Ubimo. The distinction was the combination of audience analysis, activation and measurement. Its SaaS description explains the software model, but does not provide a public subscription price or a reason to invent one.

Five hundred feet from the shelf

Neptune Retail Solutions completed its acquisition of Quotient in September 2023. In June 2025, Neptune announced a Polaris-powered program for selecting outdoor screens within 500 feet of retail stores and coordinating those messages with in-store campaigns. Its current outdoor offering continues to carry the Polaris name. Ubimo’s story now belongs inside that larger retail marketing operation.

This gives the original idea a pleasingly physical destination. A brand can think about the approach to the store and the encounter at the shelf as connected decisions. The useful habit to copy is modest: define the behavior you want, choose media around that behavior, and decide how you will measure change before spending. A splendid location is only half an argument. The other half is what happened next.