Radar raises $20m

Other investors involved include Two Sigma Ventures, Bedrock Capital, Heavybit, Primeset, and co-founders of Flatiron Health – Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner. In addition,  Accel’s Vas Natarajan will join Radar’s board.

The four year old business first started to help app developers use location – now widely established for taxi apps, food services and photo tagging among others.  

The investment will be used to build its services. The company said it was "on a mission to build the world’s most developer-friendly, privacy-first location data infrastructure".

Radar said it was launching new building blocks for location-aware apps – open-sourcing its software development kit (SDK) and introducing new tracking options to make the SDK more flexible. It is also launching APIs for geocoding, search and routing available in beta.

Addressing the privacy issues, the company said in a statement: "Unfortunately, the practice of sharing and selling data to third parties is all too common in the location space. We've set out to change this. The future of location will be powered by first-party data only, with clear opt-in from, and value for, end users. Radar is a SaaS company, not an ad tech company. We do not sell any data we collect, and we do not share location data across customers."