The architect who gave buildings a nervous system - and made sure it couldn't see you.
Thirty thousand sensors. Twenty-two countries. One billion data points processed every single day. And not a single one of them can tell you who was in the room. That is Honghao Deng's whole bet - that the most powerful way to understand a building is to refuse to see the people inside it.
Deng trained as an architect at Tianjin University, which means he started his career thinking about space as something to be designed around human bodies. But somewhere between Tianjin and Harvard's Graduate School of Design and then MIT's Media Lab, he made a more interesting pivot: instead of designing spaces for people, he started building infrastructure that could learn from them. Quietly. Invisibly. Using body heat.
"Privacy is a fundamental right, not a trade-off for services."- Honghao Deng, CEO, Butlr
Butlr, the company Deng co-founded with Jiani Zeng in 2019 as a spinout from MIT Media Lab's City Science Group, makes thermal sensors - small devices that detect human presence by reading body heat. The sensors produce data that is, by design, anonymous. There is no technical pathway from a Butlr data stream to an individual identity. The sensor sees warmth. It counts bodies. It maps movement patterns. That's it. No face. No badge. No biometric. You are, to the Heatic sensor, a thermal signal - and then you are gone.
The business case is subtle but enormous. Every major corporation, hospital, university, senior living facility, and retail chain is sitting on real estate they don't fully understand. They know how many seats there are. They don't know how many are used, when, by how many people, for how long. That gap costs money - in empty conference rooms kept climate-controlled at full tilt, in understaffed cleaning rotations, in over-built offices that nobody comes back to after 2020. Butlr fills that gap without installing a surveillance apparatus.
Customers include Verizon, Netflix, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Snowflake, CBRE, and Georgia Pacific. Series A investors included Carrier Global - the HVAC giant, which has obvious reasons to want real-time occupancy data flowing into their building systems. Series B, for $38 million, was led by Foundry in August 2024. Total funding has crossed $105 million. Revenue is early-stage relative to the fundraise, which means the market Deng is pitching is big enough that investors are willing to be patient while the category matures.
The recent push into senior care is arguably the most important thing Butlr is building right now. In 2024 the company completed its first full senior living campus deployment across 12 buildings. The pitch here is not space optimization - it's safety. A thermal sensor in a senior's room can detect a fall, an absence, an unusual stillness, without any camera ever having to invade the space. It is care infrastructure that the person being monitored can actually live with. Deng describes this as the long-term vision: not just smart offices, but spaces that genuinely respond to human presence without treating it as surveillance.
Before Butlr fully absorbed his attention, Deng and Zeng produced a body of design research that kept winning things. Illusory Material - a multi-material 3D printing technique they developed to create textiles with dynamic optical properties, changing color, texture, and refractivity based on viewing angle - was called the Best Experimental Design Project of 2020 by Fast Company, won the Red Dot Best of the Best (selected from 4,170 entries across 52 countries), and made TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions list in 2021. Deng has published peer-reviewed research at SIGGRAPH, CHI, UIST, and TEI, which is an unusual CV for someone who is also raising venture rounds and managing a 94-person company.
He was a UX Research Scientist at Airbnb before Butlr - another trajectory that doesn't quite fit any one category. Architect turned researcher turned designer turned operator. The throughline is a specific kind of attention to how humans inhabit space, and a specific discomfort with the surveillance infrastructure that usually comes packaged with "smart" building technology. Deng has said that Butlr's sensors "see people as heat, never as faces." It sounds like a tagline but it is also a constraint written into the hardware itself.
The smart building market is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the decade. Most of that money is betting on cameras, badge readers, and WiFi triangulation - systems that collect data on who you are and where you are simultaneously. Deng has made a different bet. He is building for the organizations - hospitals, universities, senior care facilities, corporate campuses - that cannot or will not install surveillance systems but still need to understand how their spaces are used.
The Heatic sensor is a small, unobtrusive device that reads thermal signatures. It does not capture faces, it does not use WiFi or Bluetooth to track devices, and it produces no personally identifiable information. It knows a warm body is there. It knows when it arrived and when it left. It can detect patterns - peak hours, dead zones, movement flow, dwell time. It can also, in a senior care context, detect something more subtle: stillness that should not be there, patterns that suggest a fall or a medical event, all without a camera watching.
The API-first data platform means Butlr's outputs plug into building management systems, cleaning management tools, HVAC controllers, space reservation software, and HR analytics dashboards. Carrier Global, which led the Series A as a strategic investor, is the most obvious example of how this works: your HVAC system runs less when nobody is in the building. The sensor tells the HVAC the truth about occupancy in real time. Energy savings follow. Sustainability reports improve.
The privacy moat: Butlr's thermal-only approach is not just an ethical position - it is a market differentiator in regulated industries. Hospitals, schools, and senior care facilities face legal and reputational constraints on surveillance that camera-based competitors cannot navigate. Deng is not just building a product; he is building the only product many of these buyers can actually deploy.
The company's geographic reach - 22 countries, coverage measured in the hundreds of millions of square feet - came faster than most physical-product companies achieve, partly because the sensor itself is small and easy to install, and partly because the data platform handles the heavy lifting of integration. You do not need to rip out existing building infrastructure. You mount a sensor, connect it to the cloud, and start receiving data.
Deng's academic background shows up in how Butlr talks about its mission. The framing is not "building efficiency software" - it is "spatial intelligence" and "Physical AI." The company's research publications at top academic venues signal that this is a team that thinks carefully about measurement methodology, privacy at the system level, and what it means to instrument a space. It is an unusual blend: the intellectual seriousness of a research lab with the go-to-market pressure of a Series B startup.
The founder dynamic matters here too. Deng (CEO) and Zeng (CPO) met at MIT Media Lab. They co-invented Illusory Material together before Butlr. Both made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022. In 2025, Zeng was named to Inc Magazine's Female Founders 500 list. The shared research pedigree means the product thinking at Butlr goes deep in a way that pure sales-led companies cannot replicate - and the co-founder stability is notable in a startup world where founding relationships often fracture under scale.
What Deng is building, ultimately, is infrastructure. Not an app. Not a dashboard. Infrastructure: the sensing layer that sits under every other smart building system, feeding it honest, anonymous data about how human beings actually use space. If Butlr reaches its stated goal of becoming a standard in all buildings, Deng will have quietly put his fingerprints on every office, hospital, school, and senior home on the planet - and nobody inside them will ever have known he was watching.
Strategic investors include Carrier Global, Qualcomm, Tiger Global, Ricoh, Hyperplane, E14 Fund, Union Labs, Tectonic Ventures, Founder Collective, 500 Startups, and SOSV.
Before Butlr's sensor network covered 22 countries, Deng and co-founder Jiani Zeng built something weirder: a material that lies to your eyes.
Illusory Material is a multi-material 3D printing technique that creates textiles with lenticular optical properties. The surface changes apparent color, texture, and refractivity depending on the viewing angle - controlled at the individual voxel level. It is, in practical terms, a surface that holds different images simultaneously, each visible only from certain angles.
The design research community noticed. Then TIME noticed. The awards pile suggests a project that genuinely pushed the frontier of fabrication science - not just a clever demo.
What connects Illusory Material to Butlr is the same underlying question: how do you build objects that communicate with human perception in honest, designed ways? The sensor that sees you only as heat, the textile that shows only what it chooses to show - both come from the same design sensibility.
Selected from 4,170 entries across 52 countries. The highest distinction in product design.
Among the 100 most significant inventions of the year, globally recognized.
Named best experimental design project of the year by Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards.
Recognized for outstanding design research and innovation in materials science.
Smart Building Technology category, recognizing innovation in architecture and built environments.
He holds an architecture degree but has never designed a building. He designs the nervous system that goes inside them.
Butlr's sensors work in total darkness. The product literally cannot take a photo - it reads heat, not light.
He was a UX Research Scientist at Airbnb before co-founding a hardware company. That's not a typical path to IoT.
His pre-company invention, Illusory Material, creates optical illusions in 3D-printed textiles. It changes appearance based on viewing angle - controlled voxel by voxel.
He has published peer-reviewed papers at SIGGRAPH - one of the most selective graphics conferences on the planet - while simultaneously raising Series B venture capital.
Butlr was born at MIT Media Lab's City Science Group, the same research lab that produced influential urban intelligence research under Carlo Ratti.