PiinPoint is launching the pilot of its online platform this week, a product designed to help companies find and select their next physical location. The tool is not niche, and is designed to help a wide range of companies discover their next locale.
If you want to find the best spot to build another coffee shop, or, as the company told TechCrunch, “a distribution centre for online retailers,” its software can help.
Founded in July of 2013, PiinPoint has raised a total of $250,000 to date from angels, Garage Capital, and Y Combinator. The company will present at tomorrow’s Y Combinator demo day.
How can PiinPoint help a broad set of businesses solve their unique business case decisions involving location? According to the firm, by bringing together data — think demographics and traffic and so forth — its tool can solve a host of questions, making the difference between the business needs of its clients manageable. Also as a web-based solution, PiinPoint thinks it has advantage over the legacy solutions that it competes with. That’s reasonable: Software in a box is static, making it stagnant. PiinPoint can keep pouring data into its system, improving it over time.
While PiinPoint is just taking its wrapping off in public this week, the company has more than ten customers, it told TechCrunch. It did not provide us with a list of names, instead merely indicating that among its customer set are “some of the best known brands in North America.”
PiinPoint charges for its product as a service, unsurprisingly.
As part of the current Y Combinator crop, I asked PiinPoint how that experience was for the firm. The company was positive, especially noting their ability inside of the program to move from an idea to a salable product.
You could call the four-person PiinPoint a cloud-based geolocating platform and so forth. But really it’s an application online that takes in data and helps businesses make decisions. When you think about it in those terms, it’s not hard to understand.
What’s next for PiinPoint? The company is looking to raise more capital. Tomorrow is its chance to kick that process off. TechCrunch will be on site.
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