Placemeter

Placemeter, founded in 2012 by Alexandre Winter and Florent Peyre, operated as an urban intelligence platform that converted video feeds into structured data. Winter, with a Ph.D. in computer vision and a history of a successful company exit, brought deep technical expertise, while Peyre contributed experience from roles at Gilt Groupe and his own prior entrepreneurial ventures. The company's core business involved using proprietary computer vision algorithms to analyze public, private, and contributed video streams, providing real-time analytics on pedestrian and vehicle traffic.

The platform was designed to transform vast amounts of video into quantifiable metrics, such as counting people and vehicles, measuring traffic speed, and estimating crowd density in various locations. This data served a diverse client base, including retailers seeking to understand foot traffic, advertisers measuring campaign reach, and cities aiming to improve urban planning and transportation. For retailers, the service offered insights comparable to online analytics, enabling them to quantify the top of their sales funnel by understanding passerby traffic. The business model focused on providing this data as a service, creating a comprehensive data layer for the physical world. Placemeter's technology could be integrated with existing security cameras or its own proprietary sensors, which were developed based on Raspberry Pi computers to make deployment simple.

The New York-based startup was a graduate of the TechStars NY program and gained early traction, raising a $1.7 million seed round and a subsequent $6 million Series A round from investors including NEA, Triplepoint Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures. In a significant milestone, Placemeter was acquired by NETGEAR in December 2016 for approximately $9.6 million. The acquisition aimed to integrate Placemeter's computer vision technology and engineering talent into NETGEAR's Arlo Smart Home Security division, enhancing the Arlo platform with advanced video analytics capabilities.

Keywords: computer vision, urban intelligence, traffic analytics, pedestrian counting, retail analytics, smart city data, video analytics, data as a service, foot traffic, Arlo