1547: The Tech Reimagining How Companies Use Their Spaces
Real estate is the largest expense for most companies. More than a trillion dollars is put towards unused (but leased) space. But for buisness leaders paying expensive leases, how much office space do they need? And how do they know how many people are in the building? The second challenge is how space used in a world of hybrid working? Are certain amenities empty while others are always crowded? Some businesses even have entire floors occupied by five people. This year, two of the most significant opportunities are optimizing real estate during a pandemic and designing real estate spaces, so employees/customers have exactly what they need and need it. When COVID hit, Density Founder and CEO Andrew Farah realized that bringing people back to the office safely, it would require new types of real-time data to ensure social distancing. They created go/wait screens for customers that gave people the necessary information to know when it was safe to enter and launched new sensors that gave even more insight into usage. Things started to take off in three months, Density had seen more revenue than all of 2019 combined. Andrew went on to raise a $51M Series C from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Jason Calacanis, and others to scale further. By the end of the year, the company had nearly doubled in size and signed a record number of Fortune 100 enterprises, universities, governments, warehouses, etc. There was no way to forecast what 2020 would hold, but Andrew was able to turn one of the worst scenarios facing any founder into the fastest growth period in company history. In today's episode, Andrew shares the journey he has been on and talks about how their technology sits above any open space and gives a real-time view of that information. There are no cameras to track people or behavior -- on purpose. Its privacy-focused and highly advanced tech uses infrared light, artificial intelligence, and depth data to determine what's happening below. Imagine the room you're in right now represented by billions of dots, with your movement shown as different colored dots lighting up in that space. Then A.I. analyzes what's happening from there.