Area served Worldwide Services Business analytics Founder Gavin Wheeldon Type of business Private | Key people Gavin Wheeldon(CEO) Website purple.ai Founded 2012 Key person Gavin Wheeldon | |
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Industry Business analysis, Software Headquarters Manchester, United Kingdom Profiles | ||
Purple WiFi is a UK-based technology firm The company offers a free WiFi platform through which businesses can surveil their customer's shopping patterns and habits, and communicate with these clients through targeted messaging.
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Purple WiFi introduced social media logins in the WiFi login process, where a customer has to like or follow or promote the social media page of the retail business to get the access of WiFi and in the process precious customer data also gets captured on its web portal. The captured data by Purple's integrated WiFi and location analysis solution can be used by the retail businesses for customer relationship management.
History
Purple WiFi was founded in 2012 by Gavin Wheeldon. The company was incorporated in 2012 as 'Purple WiFi' to provide custom WiFi solutions for the retail businesses.
Purple WiFi remained bootstrapped until 2015, before receiving its first round venture funding of $5 million from Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, Bob Willett, Iain MacDonald and Bill Currie from the William Currie Group and Juno Capital, a leading alternative asset manager. The initial funding helped the company in building the technology and establishing roots in the international market. Purple WiFi was used by enterprises in events, leisure, hospitality, tourism, education, and retail industries. Purple WiFi signed a distributor agreement with Purdicom, Ingram Micro, e92plus, Minerva, Wood Communications, Alternetivo, Chuanhow Technology Ltd, SonicNet, Wavelink, Smart Network Distribution Technologie, Baltic Premier Partners, WAV Inc, MICRO-LINK, C-MI Labs, Instillery Group and others. The software started out as an analytics ad measurement tool, and expanded to a whole suite.
The company expanded globally by partnering with major companies as its resellers in Australia, US, New Zealand, India, UK and other countries. In January 2016, the company rebranded its name to Purple.
Privacy concerns
Some writers have expressed concern regarding the privacy aspects of exchanging of personal data for free WiFi, and of retailers tracking customers within their stores via WiFi.