Prism Skylabs is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California that connects cameras within businesses to machine learning and A.I. technology in the cloud, to transform these devices into tools for Business Intelligence.[1] Prism launched as a company in 2011 at the TechCrunch Disrupt awards, where it was featured as a finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition.[2] Prism Skylabs' technology is deployed in over 80 countries and is used by more than 300 customers around the world.[3]
Prism Skylabs provides several mobile and web applications that are used by enterprise customers to make decisions using data from the cameras that are deployed throughout their businesses. Prism launched a mobile application in 2016, Vision, which allows users to search for the presence of specific objects and content within video using tags powered by neural networks.[4]
Prism Skylabs' retail web application is cloud-based software that connects to a retailer's existing video surveillance cameras. The software compresses the video data and sends it to cloud servers, where it is analyzed by Prism Skylabs' video analytics technology.[5] The company sends the analyzed data back to the retailer in the form of statistics and visualizations.[6] To address privacy concerns, the software blurs or completely deletes images of people and replaces them with graphical elements.[7]
The resulting information is intended to help businesses make sense of the large amounts of incoming video data. Prism Skylabs' goal is to enable companies to better analyze long-term trends, such as number of customers, check-out queue lengths, foot traffic patterns, dwell time[8] and the most popular products in a store.[9] Retailers use this information to improve merchandising, store layout and customer service efforts and increase operational efficiencies.[10]
Prism Skylabs was founded by Steve Russell and Ron Palmeri in July 2011.[11] Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Anthem Venture Partners, CrunchFund, Data Collective, Expa, Intel Capital, Pacific Partners, Presidio Ventures, Promus, SV Angel, Tomorrow Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners.[12] The company secured $7.5 million in Series A funding in 2011 and an additional $15 million in Series B funding in October 2013.[13] It currently has about 30 employees.[14]