Airia
Setting the Scene
Many organizations rely on outdated and inaccurate data collection methods to track occupancy levels and usage of their facilities, wasting money, energy, space, and time.
This leads to:
Gaps in Monitoring: Without proper monitoring, facilities waste energy and run up costs on unused or underused spaces.
Hardware Bottlenecks: Dependence on physical sensors is expensive, slow to install, and hard to scale.
Complexity in Safety Use-Cases: Existing tools are overly technical, making them impractical for use across offices, residences, stadiums, and military bases.
This week’s company is a software platform that analyzes and visualizes occupancy patterns in real-time, 24/7, in any type of physical space.
In a Sentence
Airia is an AI-driven spatial analytics platform that provides real-time insights into population distributions and space utilization across large scale properties.
Platform: By using WiFi and Bluetooth signals, Airia passively collects data about smartphone concentration to understand where people are in real-time.
User-interface: Data teams can use the interface to display location down to the meter, with features like playback, reports, and alerts for deeper analysis.
Use Cases: Airia is starting with heating and cooling optimization in universities to reduce energy waste and costs, with plans to expand into transit, offices, residences, stadiums, and military bases, tackling operational efficiency and safety applications like evacuation planning.
Bulleted Version:
- Similar to how Google Maps provides real-time navigation and traffic insights by leveraging GPS location data, Airia delivers real-time spatial insights and population density analytics by harnessing Wi-Fi and signal data
The Basics
- Headquarters: NYC
- Employee Count: 6
- Investors:
Backswing Ventures, Counterview Capital, OneSixOne Ventures, and DITEC Ventures.
- Business model: Multi-year SaaS
- Early traction: Multi-year SaaS
Due Diligence
WHAT WE LIKE
Market Opportunity: The fast-growing US location services market is valued at $60B+, and with buildings wasting 30% of their energy annually, Airia addresses the rising demand for energy efficiency and real-time data analytics across sectors from education to national security.
Go to Market: Initially targeting universities, which often spend millions annually on utilities across dozens of buildings, Airia can establish a foothold and traction, while validating its broader applicability for stadiums, offices, military bases & medical centers.
Long-term Expansion: Airia’s Operational AI software platform is designed to scale & adapt for high-value markets like offices, stadiums, and military bases, unlocking diverse operational and safety applications.
POTENTIAL RISKS
Data Privacy: While Airia is architected specifically to be compliant with all data privacy concerns, reliance on WiFi and Bluetooth signals could still raise concerns about compliance and privacy regulations.
Scalability: Expanding to different types of spaces and different sectors may require longer sales cycles.
Adoption Barrier: Convincing facilities to adopt a new analytics platform may require significant customer education, especially for non-technical stakeholders or organizations resistant to change.
Founder Profile
Edward Nass, CEO: Previously at Darktrace, enterprise sales, strategic partnerships, cyber security, IoT, and Data Privacy.
Stuart Anderson, CTO: Previously Former Chief of Integration @ Virtustream, IT Exec for 25+ years, Software Dev, InfoSec, DevOps, Automation, and Cloud Logistics.
Comps
Lambent Spaces: Backed by Glasswing Ventures, Nimble Ventures, Will Ventures, and others.Occuspace: Backed by Okapi Venture Capital, Shadow Ventures, Sunriver Ventures, and others.
Why Airia
By delivering an intuitive platform that anonymously analyzes and visualizes population distributions and trends, and with a differentiated focus on applying intelligence to infrastructure, Airia is position to conquer its own space in the growing analytics industry.