MONTREAL – December 9, 2020 – Potloc, Inc., the pioneer in leveraging the reach and precision of social media targeting for improving the quality, specificity and accuracy of surveys for consumer research, today announced it has closed its Series A round of funding, totaling CA$ 20M. Lead investors include France-based Cap Horn, and Canadian firms Brightspark Ventures, Desjardins Capital, EcoFuel, and Investissement Quebec. The funds will be used to further develop and expand the global reach of the Potloc solution, including the opening of the US market, where it announced the opening of a new office in New York and a country head to oversee expansion there (see accompanying announcement).
Potloc is aiming to disrupt the $80B global market research industry with an innovative approach to surveying precisely-defined and often hard-to-reach, low-incidence audiences, using the demographic and location targeting capabilities of popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others. In total, its potential available surveying audience is more than 3.8 billion social media users worldwide, allowing it to sample very specific niches based on detailed demographics, locations, purchasing behavior and other important criteria researchers need to produce the best quality results from their surveys.
“We are pleased to see the confidence from our investors in our game-changing solution for improving how businesses and organizations can gain insights into consumer trends. The need to stay on top of shifting consumer preferences and behaviors in the rapidly changing Covid era has made surveys, particularly remotely implemented, even more critical for brands,” said Rodolphe Barrere, co-founder and CEO of Potloc. “The fact that we have secured our investors commitment even in these uncertain times underscores the opportunity to enable an innovative way to conduct very specific research into a wide range of topics and across a global sampling base.”
“Potloc provides the missing ingredient in effective consumer market research: high quality and precisely defined respondents. Its solution complements existing research expertise from service providers as well as sophisticated analytics tools, with a way to extract better quality information from highly qualified and relevant audiences,” said Jaques Perreault of Brightspark Ventures.
Proven results with global firms and brands
Based on more than six years of product development by a team of 60 experts, the company has executed hundreds of surveys for multinational consulting firms, research organizations, consumer brands, commercial real estate developers, financial institutions, trade groups and other organizations that require efficient ways to sample well-defined audience segments. A sampling of its diverse client base include Boston Consulting Group, Ernst & Young, Mall of America, Carrefour, L’Oreal, Invesco, and Cushman & Wakefield.
“Potloc has the first proven solution, as evidenced by its successes with customers and the range of completed research projects, to leverage the reach and targeting capabilities of social media as a survey platform - an intuitive and user-friendly way to get qualified responses compared to traditional methods,” said Romain Vidal at Cap Horn. “This allows its clients to reach extremely specific and hard to reach populations to provide insights into very precise topics or decision criteria important to their businesses.”
“Investissement Québec is proud to reaffirm its support for Potloc, a promising company known for its innovative approach that is revolutionizing the traditional market research industry. With this reinvestment, we are able to give the business the leeway it needs to pursue its growth strategy in this pandemic context," said Guy LeBlanc, President and CEO of Investissement Québec. "That’s Investissement Québec’s mission in a nutshell: to support the development of dynamic young companies with high potential, showcase Québec talent to global clients and spur economic development in every region of Québec.”
Potloc is a tech-enabled consumer research company that conducts survey sampling through social networks. With its sampling technology, Potloc can reach any niche audiences or geo-targeted survey respondents to provide businesses and organizations with valuable insights. Leading brands and top consulting firms worldwide leverage this sampling approach to acquire respondents, understand their consumer base, and solve strategic challenges. Headquartered in Montreal and founded in 2014, Potloc has global offices in North America and Europe. Check us out at www.potloc.com.
