French location data company Singlespot has long built its business on collecting and using geolocation data through an SDK. It has now launched Kura, a product that creates private marketplaces (PMPs) optimized to deliver concrete outcomes.
Kura starts with a single use case, store visits. The platform will extend the same approach to other outcomes, such as ad attention and purchase intent.
To run the new business, Singlespot hired Kevan Abdoli, formerly general manager for Europe at location data company Adsquare. His brief is clear: put the company back in the spotlight after years spent largely out of the trade press.
Singlespot is no newcomer. It belongs to the generation of French drive-to-store ad companies that emerged in the mid-2010s. Growth in that sector slowed sharply a few years later, as the regulatory climate got tougher. That pushed Singlespot to look for new growth drivers.
"With drive-to-store shutting down, we picked up on growing interest in foot traffic data from companies outside media," said Thomas Opoczynski, CEO and co-founder of Singlespot. "We used it to build a model that doesn't depend on advertising alone."
Singlespot repositioned itself as a data supplier to third parties. Its location data, collected through an SDK embedded in a range of apps, kept feeding a large part of the ad tech ecosystem, from ad networks to measurement firms. Other buyers came in too, such as French airport operator ADP and French public transit operator Keolis, mostly for use cases tied to analyzing mobility flows.
Kura is part of a wider reorganization. Singlespot now runs three units: data supply through its SDK, Kura for the media layer, and a third entity still in development. That one focuses on geomarketing and analytics, with an approach closer to consulting and custom studies.
Abdoli has two jobs. He has to grow Kura's sales and bring Singlespot back into market conversations, just as curation, supply path optimization and the hunt for differentiated signals move to the center of the business.
Instead of being activated downstream, signals (visits, attention, intent) are injected on the supply side, as close to the inventory as possible, through a pre-bid SSP integration.
Kura puts data back at the center of media campaigns by plugging it in where the buying decision gets made. Instead of being activated downstream, signals (visits, attention, intent) are injected on the supply side, as close to the inventory as possible, through a pre-bid SSP integration.
That lets Kura filter impressions upstream and keep only those with a high probability of driving business outcomes that third parties can measure. "In live campaigns, the engine discards 90% of bid requests on average to concentrate delivery on the highest-value inventory," said Abdoli.
Until now, many activations have relied on fixed segments activated in the DSP, with fairly simple logic. Take drive-to-store. Buyers target in-market shoppers or a retailer's past visitors, then tweak at the margins mid-campaign. Singlespot believes that approach has hit its limits.
Kura works differently. For drive-to-store, the starting point is no longer a predefined marketing segment but an analysis of the people who actually visit. The company takes the movement history it observes in its data. It then cross-references that history against the characteristics of bid requests on the SSP side to rebuild what amounts to the visitor's "DNA."
The goal is to identify which exposure signals best predict a visit, then build PMPs that keep evolving based on observed results. Put simply, Kura swaps static targeting for a learning loop.
Visits become the model's training signal. When an exposed user walks into a store, that user's bid request feeds the algorithm, which gradually sharpens its selection criteria. That iterative loop is the core of the product. It can also apply to other outcomes, such as attention or purchase intent.
Kura chose ad tech company Equativ to build its PMPs. "With Kura, we offer an intelligence layer that qualifies every impression before the auction even happens," said Pegah Mofidi, France managing director at Equativ. "Agencies and advertisers can now focus their spend on inventory that directly serves their performance goals and their ROI."
Moving upstream of the buy also lets Singlespot tackle a familiar problem for data companies: losing visibility on the demand side. Between throttling, opaque platforms and diluted signals, segment providers often have little control over how their data actually gets used once it's activated.
Picking the supply side is a strategic call as much as a technical one. Singlespot wants to take back control of the value chain and bring the signal closer to the inventory. The end goal is a firmer grip on performance and costs.
Kura has already moved forward commercially. Several campaigns launched in April with a first major advertiser, backed by a holding company. Those first activations are meant to prove out the model before a broader rollout.
