Lenskart has invested USD 2 million in the pre-Series A of GeoIQ, an AI-based local intelligence platform. The round also saw participation from existing investors, 9 Unicorns, Venture Catalysts and Ecosystem Ventures.

Founded in 2018, Bengaluru-based GeoIQ is a geo-analytics company that provides real-time hyper location data for enabling strategic decision making across industries. The startup aspires to be the go-to platform for predicting hyper-local business performance across geographies with a mission to quantify each location’s risk and opportunities for businesses to operate efficiently.

“Lenskart has always been at the helm of leveraging technology to enhance its offerings for better customer experience and drive differentiation, and we have continually partnered with founders in doing that. With GeoIQ technology, Lenskart will be opening the most efficient omnichannel stores globally with a 50% better return on invested capital and 5x more opening speed. Through this funding, we also want to help facilitate GeoIQ’s ambition of becoming a world-class geo-analytics company in the long run by providing more opportunities to explore, experiment and innovate when it comes to CX,” said Peyush Bansal, co-founder and CEO, Lenskart.

GeoIQ’s AI-based location tool will help Lenskart with its aggressive store rollout strategy by identifying new locations to open high ROI potential stores. It will also gather accurate market share data across micro markets and run more targeted regional marketing campaigns.

“The use of analytics has become widespread as more and more businesses recognise the benefits of data. AI-based intelligence has evolved rapidly and is currently in a hyper-adoption stage. The funds raised will enable us to add new features to our product and empower our customers,” said Devashish Fuloria, CEO, GeoIQ.

Over the next 12 months, GeoIQ aims to empower 1000 data teams across India and the US with its no-code location AI and targets a 10x increase in its API usage to enable 3 million decisions a day. The startup also plans to improve its product offering and expand its workforce for product and sales led roles.