Butlr is an MIT Media Lab spinout led by CEO Honghao Deng that builds a physical AI platform and sensors to understand subtle movements in a space. Its technology discerns activity, occupancy, indoor location, and body posture while being purposely designed to be incapable of capturing personally identifiable information. The company sells sensors and data used by employers, hospitality companies, retailers, and senior living communities to identify patterns and behaviors. Customers named in the articles include Walmart, 9solutions, Carrier, Qualcomm, Shell Point, and Verizon. Butlr positions its product to inform decisions about real estate investment planning, asset management, occupancy, health, and energy efficiency. The company intends to use recent funding to expand its presence, mainly in senior care communities. Butlr provides an anonymous people sensing platform that uses body heat and machine learning to detect occupancy, headcount and activity and to generate accurate, real-time and historical spatial insights. The platform is designed to be incapable of collecting personally identifiable information. Its patented technology architecture enables deployment in minutes with a low total cost of ownership. Commercial real estate and assisted living facilities use Butlr to drive space utilization, optimize pricing, streamline operations, and improve the user experience. The company was founded by Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng, both named to Forbes 30 Under 30. Butlr intends to use the $5M raised to accelerate growth, expand operations and broaden its business reach. Butlr develops palm-sized thermal sensors and AI that estimate office occupancy by detecting body heat and streaming anonymized "temperature pixels" to a cloud dashboard and API. The sensors require only a Wi‑Fi connection and a hub, claim multiyear battery life, and are designed to preserve privacy by not capturing images. Its products target commercial real estate and senior living, with use cases including space planning, facilities management, smart cleaning integrations (via partner Infogrid) and a fall-detection service priced from $120 per sensor per year. The company was spun out of MIT Media Lab and co-founded by Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng. Butlr has landed Fortune 500 customers including Georgia Pacific and Carrier but declined to disclose revenue or customer counts. The company is expanding its 50-person workforce and plans to use new funding to accelerate product development and grow its go-to-market team while exploring additional markets like assisted care facilities. Butlr develops anonymous, wireless thermal sensors (Heatic) and a spatial-intelligence platform that converts five frames-per-second body-heat data into occupancy, headcount and activity insights. Its palm-sized wireless sensors require one-time setup, run on batteries for two years, and intentionally do not capture faces to preserve privacy. The company sells basic kits starting at $880 and offers space-designing software and an API for customers to plan sensor placement and integrate insights. Butlr was spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2019 and is based in Burlingame, California. It is shipping out hundreds of thousands of sensors and grew almost 10x in revenue last year. Management is targeting market expansion and further technology development, including a more advanced API and new use cases such as assisted living fall detection and traffic-flow monitoring. Butlr develops ceiling-mounted, wireless, battery-powered passive-infrared sensors combined with AI to track people’s indoor movement without identifying individuals. The sensors detect body heat to infer motion, pathways, occupancy and queue lengths, enabling applications like mood lighting, HVAC control, queue management and after-hours alarms. The company says its technology is deployed in about 200,000 retail stores and has customers including supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market and the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Butlr retooled its software to add maximum-occupancy and queue-management features and tested them in China before rolling the updates out to global customers, including in the United States. The startup emphasizes privacy by design—the sensors track location and movement but do not capture identity—and positions itself as a lower-cost alternative to cameras and facial recognition. Financially, the company closed a $1.2 million seed funding round last month as demand shifted toward pandemic-driven store reopening tools.

Total raised

$72M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Aug 2024