Cintric

Founded in 2014 by Conner Bowlan, Erwan Lent, Joel Green, Rhett Rainen, and Ian Donahue, Cintric developed a specialized mobile software development kit (SDK) to provide companies with actionable consumer and location intelligence. The venture was established by a team with diverse backgrounds, including co-founder Erwan Lent, who served as CTO and had prior experience in application development and founding other tech ventures. This collective expertise was pivotal in shaping Cintric's core technology.

The company's business model centered on licensing its SDK to mobile application developers and enterprises. By integrating Cintric's lightweight SDK, clients could anonymously and passively collect location data from their opted-in user base around the clock. This raw data was then processed and analyzed by Cintric's platform, transforming it into valuable insights. These insights included determining users' home and work locations, identifying significant places they frequent, and understanding behavioral patterns. The technology also enabled the grouping of users based on shared affinities and behaviors. This intelligence was accessible to clients through a web-based panel and a public API, allowing them to enhance user experiences, increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and gain a deeper understanding of their user demographics and competitor landscape.

Cintric’s service provided businesses with near real-time data on retail store visitation, customer loyalty, and demographic trends. For example, a client could analyze foot traffic patterns to understand associations between different retail chains or segment their user base geographically. The platform offered tools for data visualization on map-based interfaces and the ability to export raw data for further analysis, while also incorporating privacy controls for end-users. In July 2017, Cintric was acquired by UberMedia (now Near), a mobile advertising and analytics company. The acquisition provided UberMedia with a new stream of mobile location data, highlighting the increasing importance of this information for mobile advertising and analytics. Following the acquisition, members of the founding team transitioned into roles within UberMedia, with Conner Bowlan becoming VP of Product Development and later VP of Strategy, and Erwan Lent taking on the role of VP of Engineering.

Keywords: location intelligence, mobile SDK, consumer analytics, user behavior tracking, location data, geotargeting, retail analytics, customer insights, mobile advertising data, user segmentation, foot traffic analysis, data monetization, API access, behavioral patterns, affinity grouping, mobile analytics platform, user location tracking, consumer intelligence, data-as-a-service, ad campaign effectiveness