- Retailers have found themselves tasked with enforcing social distancing to protect employees and make customers feel safe in their stores.
- Startups have popped up around this specific need to provide retailers with seamless solutions to developing socially distant shopping.
- These five startups are creating technologically to target social distancing in retail spaces and attracting investor attention.
Social distancing is a proven method to reduce the spread of coronavirus, but stores across the country are opening. Retailers across the country have now found themselves figuring out how to enforce distancing measures so they can keep employees safe while at work, and customers feeling safe enough to shop in-store.
As a result, a number of startups have sprung up to help retailers create unique physical distancing solutions for their brick and mortar locations.
"Retail spaces are a particularly interesting and challenging space because they are so varied," Jeffrey Siegel, professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto told Business Insider. "A grocery store is completely different from a little boutique which is completely different from a home improvement store."
These varied spaces present great opportunities for innovators up to the challenge of managing the flow of people. Here are some of the startups that have caught the attention of investors like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and MIT Media Lab's E14 Fund.
Density
Density is a people-counting technology startup that launched in 2013 to measure how cities, buildings, and spaces are used in real-time, while protecting anonymity. This technology has clear applications to social distancing, and Density made its tech even more explicitly useful when it launched Safe, a software product that monitors occupancy of a space. The tech lets employees and customers check a screen outside that lets them know if they're able to enter while maintaining safe social distance protocols based on the current occupancy.
Companies looking for technology to help them monitor their spaces took notice. In May, Density's sales were up 560% quarter over quarter. Its customers include major brands like Starbucks, Delta, Uber, Verizon, and Pinterest, and is also used by universities like NYU and Notre Dame University.
Density has raised $67.2 million since its launch and is backed by heavyweight VC firms like Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund and Kleiner Perkins, as well as baseball legend Alex Rodriguez.
Polte
Polte uses IoT-enabled devices and chips to track asset locations without Wi-Fi or GPS. The technology has been used for supply-chain management, shipment tracking, and shrinkage prevention. Now it's being applied to social distancing and contact tracing efforts.
The company's latest product, called Proximity, is a wearable that uses Polte's asset management technology to keep track of people. The wearable is worn by employees and alerts them when they're too close to another employee. The alert continues sounding until it is dismissed. It also allows employers to identify high-risk events in real-time as well as keeps a log of any identified contacts to allow for contact tracing if a case is identified while protecting privacy. Polte has raised 18.5M since its founding in 2003 and plans to donate half of its profits made from Proximity to coronavirus relief efforts, according to Dallas Innovates.
Qudini
Launched in 2014, Qudini's suite of "Retail Choreography Solutions" are now being applied to COVID-19 shopping hurdles. Qudini offers retailers "virtual queue" technology that customers might be familiar with from dining a restaurant — it allows customers to check on their spot in line remotely from their phone and receive alerts when their table is ready. This solution could now be used for appointment retail shopping, and avoids creating long lines outside of stores that require monitoring by staff.
Qudini also offers appointment booking software products, so retailers can offer customers a regulated and scheduled way to shop in their brick and mortar locations, as well as contactless online order pickup experiences.
Pathr
Pathr is an AI-powered spatial intelligence platform, meaning their technology uses anonymous location data to identify how humans are interacting within a space and then develops business insights for retailers. The team at Pathr has now launched a product called Social Distance Score, which uses Pathr's technology to assess foot traffic and store layout to help retailers configure their stores to better enable social distancing during COVID-19, as well as monitor and adjust flow of traffic in real-time.
Pathr was founded by MIT Media Lab alum, George Shaw, and received funding from E14 Fund, an early-stage seed fund that invests in alums of the Media Lab, according to a press release announcing the funding in January.
Voxel51
Voxel51 launched with a mission to offer users a way to gather and process video footage data at scale by using machine learning algorithms that can identify and annotate objects within videos. This innovation on traditional image-based technology earned them $3.3 million in funding.
When the pandemic hit the US, the team at Voxel51 figured out how to apply their technology to help retailers keeping track of store traffic by creating a dashboard that shows where people are in the store and parking lot that refreshes once per minute, according to the National Retail Federation. The team is also developing a customer-facing dashboard that allows them to see how many people are in the store at a given time, so they can determine whether they feel comfortable shopping. And Voxel51 does this all while keeping privacy top of mind — their technology blurs pixels to obscure information that could identify individuals.
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