AdNear, the Singapore-headquartered location intelligence platform, today announced that they are rebranding to ‘Near’. Dropping the word ‘Ad‘ to emphasise the platform’s increased focus on using location data for much beyond targeted mobile advertising.

Launched just over two years ago, the company initially started out offering brands the ability to tap into intelligent mobile advertising. However, they have outgrown the name to provide customers with the ability to create custom audiences, derive powerful real-time consumer insights and measure offline attribution – an empowering data solution that far exceeds pure advertising.

“Location has always been at the heart of our technology and increasingly the demand for information isn’t to drive advertising decisions but to drive business decisions or broader business intelligence,” Cameron Curtis, Australian and New Zealand general manager, told B&T (pictured above). “While location remains core to data sets that we collect the decreasing emphasis on advertising has made it an appropriate time to remove two small letters from our name.”

Added Anil Mathews, founder and CEO of Near: “We are no longer a company just focusing on using location data for mobile advertising. Since launching in 2012, we been doing a lot more with our data.This is a big step for us, but it is also a natural progression as things have changed tremendously over time. Location data has always been at the core of everything we do, our products and our brand identity. And now, our new name truly reflects that.”

Curtis added that data is no longer about allying consumers with a certain product but it can help make corporations make huge investment decisions when it came to launching new products and even opening new outlets.

“Starting any new business venture is a very expensive venture,” Curtis said. “You’ve got the cost of council, the cost of developers, you’ve got the cost of set-up and overlaid in all of that is the question ‘is the catchment good enough to justify the investment?’  And given all the enormous investment that goes into those decisions, what Near can do is improve that again, and improve it to a multitude.

“And core to that is why we’re changing the name. Because the emphasis has to be on what we do rather than where we happen to derive revenue,” he said.

With the new name in place, Near aims to focus on helping marketers across industries take sharp decisions and provide them with innovative data solutions. The company recently launched in Europe with their UK office and announced leadership hires across geographies.