Purple, the intelligent spaces company, today announced a $7 million investment. This comprises a growth loan secured from Boost&Co, which totals $3.9 million, and additional funds contributed by existing investors.
The investment has been secured following Purple’s impressive global traction with major service providers, a series of large customer wins and huge growth in platform usage. Purple now boasts 18 million users, with deployments in 73 countries.
The funds will be used to recruit in excess of 100 new staff at existing locations, including offices in the UK, Spain, the US, Singapore and Australia; and more international locations as they open. The recruitment drive will bring in talented development and sales employees who will play an integral part in Purple’s success globally, and also strengthening all departments within the Company.
Purple is a leader in real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces.
Through the process of creating ‘Intelligent Spaces’, Purple can help brands to learn more about their location and customer base, and help them to take action.
Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Purple, comments: “We’ve had unbelievable growth over the last few years and this latest investment allows us to continue building momentum. Our platform has now accelerated past 18 million users and the opportunity for physical spaces to lead in analytics and personalised engagement is huge. Purple is firmly positioned at the forefront of that market as we develop our presence globally.”
About Purple
Purple is an intelligent spaces company. It evolved from Purple WiFi, the cloud-based marketing and analytics WiFi software company, to take the lead in real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces.
Purple refers to this process as ‘Intelligent Spaces’ and can help brands to learn more about their location, customer base and help them to take action.
With 18 million users across 134 countries, Purple works with a range of brands and venues, including Indiana Pacers, Century Link, British Land and Merlin Entertainment.
It has a global agreement in place with Westcon Comstor, in addition to an active reseller base of over 960 in 60 countries. Purple employs over 90 full time staff and currently has offices in the UK, US, Chile, Madrid, Singapore and Melbourne with more offices planned.
Huge growth is being seen in all sectors, including hospitality, where people have time to spend online, retail, where footfall tracking is essential, healthcare, offering transparency around service and communication and entire cities moving towards the Internet of Things.
Purple divides its offering into two specific segments: small businesses and enterprise customers.
Small businesses can continue to take advantage of Purple’s free guest WiFi product and purchase a cloud software license, which allows open access to marketing and analytics tools.
Enterprise customers have the option of four product lines: WiFi, Location, and two new offerings: Fusion and Provision.
- Purple WiFi is the well-established guest WiFi, analytics and marketing product.
- Purple Location is a location based services product that works to actually pinpoint devices, enable heat mapping, provide zone flow information and enable journey management.
- Purple Fusion is the latest offering, enabling connection to any type of data source, which can then be analysed and actioned. A variety of different data sources will be utilised to harvest information about any physical space.
- Purple Provision is a commercial product more suitable for businesses, enabling a completely secure guest and staff WiFi environment. This uses automatic certificate provisioning instead of WPA or other encrypted WiFi SSID’s, which are intrinsically insecure for a BYOD environment.