The gap in legacy retail analytics
The leading cause of small-business closure is poor site selection. Plenty of retail-analytics tools exist, and the global leader is valued at $1.5B. Yet small-business closure rates do not improve. This page lays out the four structural limits of existing retail data.
Each vendor has its own strength — but the real-time interior layer is, for now, only ours.
| Company | Data source | Inside store | Queue (measured) | Visualization |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Placer.ai Global $1.5B valuation · $100M ARR · from $1,000+ / month | Mobile GPS aggregation | · | · | Dashboard (high cost) |
SafeGraph Global Location accuracy ~60%, mostly B2B API | GPS + POI | · | · | Dashboard |
Near (now Azira) Global Reorganized after Chapter 11 in 2023 | GPS + Wi-Fi + carrier | · | · | Dashboard |
Nice Bizmap Korea Digital wallets (KakaoPay / Naver Pay) not reflected | Credit-card sales | · | · | Dashboard |
SK Geovision Korea No floor-level separation, limited to carrier subscribers | Cell-tower + card sales | · | · | Dashboard |
RealDataLab Korea → Global Pixel-level interior + generative AI visualization | On-device camera CV | ✓ | ✓ | AI image |
GPS-based positioning cannot separate a first-floor cafe from a fifth-floor office in the same building. After iOS 14+ and Android 10+ randomized MAC addresses, Wi-Fi probe tracking has lost its measurement base. You can know how many people walked past the building. You cannot know who is inside the store.
Per the Bank of Korea Payment Methods Usage Survey 2024 (released 2025-03-25), the offline payment mix by transaction count is credit card 46.2%, debit card 16.4%, mobile card 12.9%, cash 15.9%, and other 8.6%. Analytics built on credit-card sales miss the remaining ~37% (cash, digital wallets, other), and the 5–7 day card-settlement cycle adds a real-time gap. Digital-wallet adoption among younger cohorts also introduces a generational sampling bias.
No commercial service measures real-time customer density inside the store. The intuition a founder picks up walking through candidate sites — "this place is busy" — has no equivalent in data. The same gap holds for direct queue counting.
Placer.ai and Nice Bizmap are designed for trained analysts on enterprise dashboards (from $1,000+ per month). Aspiring founders, junior franchise-HQ staff, and property-acquisition reviewers rarely make the chart meaningful in time.
We use cameras instead of GPS, the inside of the store instead of the outside, and a photograph instead of a dashboard. Video does not leave the device; only metadata travels. That is how the four structural gaps close at once.