Prism Skylabs is a

technology Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...

company headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

that connects cameras within businesses to

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and A.I. technology in the cloud, to transform these devices into tools for

Business Intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

. Prism launched as a company in 2011 at the TechCrunch Disrupt awards, where it was featured as a finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition. Prism Skylabs' technology is deployed in over 80 countries and is used by more than 300 customers around the world.

Product

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 A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

. 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. The company sends the analyzed data back to the retailer in the form of statistics and visualizations. To address privacy concerns, the software blurs or completely deletes images of people and replaces them with graphical elements. 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 and the most popular products in a store. Retailers use this information to improve

merchandising Merchandising is any practice which contributes to the sale of Product (business), products ("merch" colloquially) to a retail consumer. At a retail in-store level, merchandising refers to displaying products that are for sale in a creative w ...

, store layout and customer service efforts and increase operational efficiencies.

History

Prism Skylabs was founded by Steve Russell and Ron Palmeri in July 2011. Its

investor An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future Return on capital, return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital the investor usually purchases some species of pr ...

s include

Andreessen Horowitz AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

, Anthem Venture Partners,

CrunchFund J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970) is the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in America and elsewhere. Magazines such as ...

, Data Collective, Expa,

Intel Capital Intel Capital Corporation started off as the investment arm of Intel Corporation in 1991 and in January 2025, it spun off as a standalone investment fund. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies off ...

, Pacific Partners,

Presidio Ventures A presidio (''jail, fortification'') was a fortified base established by the Spanish Empire mainly between the 16th and 18th centuries in areas under their control or influence. The term is derived from the Latin word ''praesidium'' meaning ''pr ...

Promus In Greek mythology, the suitors of Penelope (also known in Latin as the ) are one of the main subjects of Homer's ''Odyssey''. Role in the ''Odyssey'' In the ''Odyssey,'' Homer describes Odysseus' journey home from Troy. Prior to the Trojan War ...

, SV Angel,

Tomorrow Ventures Tomorrow may refer to: * Tomorrow (time), the day after today * The future, that which occurs after the present Periodicals * ''To-Morrow'' (Chicago magazine), a magazine from 1903 to 1909 * ''Tomorrow'' (New Zealand magazine), a left-wing mag ...

and

Triangle Peak Partners A triangle is a polygon with three corners and three sides, one of the basic shapes in geometry. The corners, also called Vertex (geometry), ''vertices'', are zero-dimensional point (geometry), points while the sides connecting them, also ca ...

. The company secured $7.5 million in

Series A funding A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in excha ...

in 2011 and an additional $15 million in Series B funding in October 2013. It currently has about 30 employees."Intel invests $15m in Prism SkyLabs"
by Martha Entwistle – Security Systems News - Retrieved 3/20/2014

References

{{Reflist Companies based in San Francisco