You may have already heard the news: Gravy Analytics is merging with location insights and data company, Unacast. Starting today, Gravy Analytics and Unacast are a team, and we’re tremendously excited about what that means for our business, our customers, and our partners and friends.

But, first, I want to tell you a little story about our history as a company, and how we’ve arrived at this point, because it’s been a journey.

When we founded the company that would become Gravy Analytics back in 2011, it was with a very different objective: to connect people with fun things to do in their local area. The events people attend tell us a lot about their interests, and we knew that if we could capture that information with an app, we could recommend even more events for them to enjoy.

Back then, our name wasn’t even Gravy; it was TimeRazor. It wasn’t until after we received a strongly worded letter from the lawyers at Razor, the scooter company, that we changed our name to Gravy. Our logic? A special event livens up our everyday existence in much the same way gravy makes whatever’s on your plate that much better.

Fast-forward another couple of years, and we realized that it wasn’t just an event that could tell us about people’s interests and preferences, but where they go in general. The beach or the mountains, Target or Walmart, yoga or cycling, Ford or Chevy? The list goes on. And when we looked at this data, in aggregate, it told us a heck of a lot about new consumer trends, the competitive landscape, and our local communities. Once again, our name changed: this time to Gravy Analytics.

Since then, some of the world’s biggest brands have used our data to power their advertising campaigns and connect with their ideal customers. Enterprise software companies chose our data to fuel their own, specialized research platforms. Under our Data for Social Good program, an array of research teams have used our data in innovative ways: to understand if certain personality traits help to protect against echo chambers, to model the spread of COVID-19 in small towns, and to study evacuation patterns in response to wildfires. The many use cases for this data continue to amaze us.

So when Thomas Walle, CEO and co-founder of Unacast, and I first sat down to explore synergies between our respective companies, it wasn’t entirely a surprise to discover that they’d built a location analytics business serving customers in different markets with different use cases. Their product suite was complementary to ours, too. When Thomas and I first introduced our respective leadership teams to one another in August, the excitement was palpable: What could we achieve with a product suite built to serve customers at every stage of their data analytics journey? What other markets could we serve with a unified, global data stream that reveals what’s happening in our world?

Which, incidentally, is how Unacast got its name. Where a “broadcast” is a single data stream sent to many people, a “unicast” brings myriad, single data points about people together into a single, massive data stream reflecting global human movement. We think this does a pretty good job of explaining what it is that we’ll be working on together. 

Although our name isn’t changing quite yet, there are plenty of changes underway. For starters,  I’ll be working with Thomas as the new CEO and I will be taking on the role of President. There will be new product offerings, particularly for smaller businesses that haven’t, to date, been able to benefit from the sort of insights that location analytics provide. There will be some new faces, too, all of whom believe in the potential of this merger and the power of location data to tell the stories of our world. We can’t wait to introduce you.

At the same time, much of what we’ve built to date will stay the same. The same great data, reliable service, and exceptional customer support that our customers have come to rely on. The same commitment to leading the conversation around consumer data privacy. The same great team and people, too—many of whom have been with us from the very start.

It’s an exciting time here at Gravy…and at Unacast. Cheers to the next stage of our journey.

Jeff