Prism Skylabs

Prism Skylabs is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Using machine learning, Prism Skylabs provides analysis of businesses' CCTV video.^[1]

History

Prism Skylabs was founded by Steve Russell and Ron Palmeri in July 2011.^[2] It launched as a company in 2011 at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, where it was featured as a finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition.^[3] 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.^[4] The company secured $7.5 million in Series A funding in 2011 and an additional $15 million in Series B funding in October 2013.^[5] As of 2014, the company has about 30 employees.^[6]

Product

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.^[7] The company sends the analyzed data back to the retailer in the form of statistics and visualizations.^[8] To address privacy concerns, the software blurs or completely deletes images of people and replaces them with graphical elements.^[9]

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.^[10]

Through Prism Skylabs, firms may be able to analyze long-term trends, such as number of customers, check-out queue lengths, foot traffic patterns, dwell time,^[11] and the most popular products in a store.^[12] Retailers use this information to improve merchandising, store layout, customer service efforts, and operational efficiencies.^[13]