Entering its fourth year of existence, G2 Research is branching out from GPS analytics for law enforcement to new sectors such as fleet management, security for companies using shippers, and high-risk offender monitoring.

The Dartmouth company has been successful in its core market, never raising equity financing and selling to law enforcement agencies in five countries on three continents. More than 90 per cent of its sales are outside Canada.

 “Currently, it’s for investigating bad guys,” said CEO Tom Gilgan in an interview. “Police will put a tracking device on a vehicle and we can interpret the mountains of data generated and tell what they’re doing.”

By analyzing data from the Global Positioning System, a space-based satellite location system, G2 can tell suspects’ daily routines, notice when they stray from that routine, tell who they are meeting with and do predictive analytics on what they may be planning. “In law enforcement, we believe we’re the only ones in the Western World doing this,” he said.

G2 Research, which has 10 employees, has always considered itself a location analytics company rather than a crime prevention outfit, so it is now moving into new lines of business, such as monitoring or investigating taxi, trucking and municipal vehicle fleets and tracking high-risk offenders. There could be applications in auto insurance, work safety and pharmaceuticals.

It’s beginning to gain traction in a few of these. For example, it is working with a consumer products company to make sure its shippers are honouring their contracts. Such companies reportedly lose about $2 billion to $3 billion in stolen merchandise during shipping in the U.S. alone.

“We’ve got a core technology that we’re in the process of putting into a licensing format,” said Gilgan. The company will likely form separate units or sister companies for each segment of business. With each segment, it could either license out the technology or develop it internally. If it does develop the business itself, G2 or a subsidiary will likely have to raise capital for that unit and hire … new staff for such jobs as product development, sales and marketing.

As I’ve stated before, data analytics are a hot sector not only in Atlantic Canada but around the world. What’s interesting about G2 is that it is rare to find a company specializing in GPS analytics.

Because of its background working with crime prevention, the company so far has avoided the spotlight. Its senior executives — Gilgan, Bruce Annand and Ron Stewart — have never had to court investors, so it was all but unknown to the startup community until it was one of nine companies chosen for MentorCamp in September. (MentorCamp is a one-day session that allows some of the region’s top startups to meet with international mentors and potential investors.)

Gilgan said the meetings with these mentors convinced the company that it could and should move beyond law enforcement in the near term.

 “MentorCamp was a turning point for our company — I mean that honestly,” he said. “The advice and mentorship we received at MentorCamp has moved our company forward by years.”