As the pandemic presses on, businesses across the country are debating whether or not to allow their employees back to work in enclosed office spaces. Despite the recent embrace of remote work by tech giants like Google and Twitter, smaller companies and essential businesses might be operating with limited resources and have no choice but to remain open.
San Francisco-based startup Density is offering up a digital tool to assist with crowd control, for businesses both big and small.
Density, founded in 2014, hopes to help aid social distancing efforts with its real-time, people-counting technology. Density’s technology allows enterprises to track how many employees or customers are inhabiting an enclosed space at any given time.
Density’s platform could play a vital role in helping to ensure COVID-19 safety measures are enforced in workplaces across the country.
“Nearly half of the workforce can’t work from home,” Andrew Farah, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “The world is trying to reopen. In many places essential businesses are required to remain open. Companies are just trying to do this safely.”
Using proprietary depth sensors and deep learning algorithms, Density’s platform has the ability to monitor people anonymously.
“We’re giving [companies] actual data to say, here’s where you have more space or where you can actually let go of some space and here’s where you’re totally maxed out in terms of occupancy. There’s a real value there,” Density CMO Aleks Strub said in an interview with Built In.
The people-counting platform raised $51 million in a Series C financing round announced on Tuesday. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and 01 Advisors, while additional investors included former New York Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez.
The additional funding will be used to double down on growth and product development. According to the company, Density is looking to expand its production lines and increase the size of its sales team.
“We feel really honored to be able to be a solution that is helping people think about how they can enter this new era,” Strub continued.
Although Density’s technology is primarily used to monitor crowd size in office spaces, it can also be applied elsewhere. Grocery retailers, for example, can use Density’s technology to monitor and limit the amount of customers shopping in their stores.
“Our team is working around the clock to handle unprecedented demand from offices, manufacturers, grocery stores, industrial plants, governments, etc. They’re relying on [us] to rationalize real estate and keep people safe,” Farah said in a statement.
According to Strub, Density closed more business in its first quarter earlier this year, when the pandemic initially emerged, than it did all of last year. Strub hopes to see continued success for the people-counting platform, beyond the scope of the global pandemic.
“Our philosophy is that there is no future in which humans don’t need to understand how their space is used,” Strub said to Built In.
Density has raised a total of $67.2 million in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase. Upfront Ventures, Founders Fund and Ludlow Ventures also participated in the round, among others. The company has additional offices in New York City.
