Developers have Stripe for payments, Mixpanel for analytics, and Twilio for communications, but what about location.
That’s where Radar comes in.
Radar was founded by Nick Patrick, former Foursquare and Handy employee, along with his fellow Foursquarer Coby Berman, after realizing that lots of apps need location services, but it’s tedious and difficult to build out on the back end.
Patrick recounted trying to build location tools that would help track Handy cleaners on behalf of Handy customers and wondering why some back-end service didn’t already exist to help with that.
So Patrick and Berman built out Radar and are today launching it out of Expa Labs.
Radar lets customers integrate with the Radar SDK and instantly start setting up geofences, tracking entry and exit events, and ultimately using that data to create a better experience for end-user.
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Patrick sees three buckets where Radar could significantly help a developer: increasing engagement, increasing revenue, and improving operations.
You can imagine how Tinder might benefit from sending you a ping when a user you’ve already matched with is within a few blocks of you. Or how retail stores might use your location to send you special deals or offers if you’re near the store. And finally, services like Handy and Postmates could stop building out location tracking services for their couriers and simply tie in to Radar to offer real-time location information to waiting end-customers.
“The biggest challenge is creating a tool that spans so many use cases elegantly,” said Patrick.
Radar launches publicly today, offering a free tier for folks who wish to try out the service, and an enterprise tier for people who need hands-on support. The enterprise tier is priced based on usage.
This extra location data is stored with Radar, keeping personally identifiable information separate from the actual location data, ensuring privacy for the end-user.
Radar has received $500K in funding from Expa Labs.
You can check out Radar here.