Thursday, April 20, 2017

ESRI's Dangermond Backs GIS Data Startup SafeGraph

Jack Dangermond, the founder of Redlands-based Esri, is one of the angels which has backed San Francisco-based geospatial intelligence data company SafeGraph. SafeGraph, which says it is collectiong geospatial intelligence data for use in machine learning, said it raised $16M in a Series A funding this week, from IDG Ventures USA, plus a long list of over 100 angels, which included Dangermond, Peter Thiel, Adam D'Angelo, Romesh Wadhwani, Eric Cantor, KT zu Guttenberg, Prince Turki Al Saud, Barry Sternlicht, Pete Briger, Naval Ravikant, and Nicolas Berggruen. The company says it wants to help "answer humanity's biggest questions" using a "ground truth dataset" initially focused on "human movement". SafeGraph, which is led by Auren Hoffman, has not disclosed what it's product is about; Dangermond and ESRI helped create the modern geographical information system (GIS) industry; ESRI started developing GIS systems in 1969. More information »