Occuspace

The company builds occupancy-intelligence hardware and software that measures how physical spaces are used - foot traffic, real-time head counts, dwell time and whether a room is free. Its sensors do not use cameras. Instead they passively scan the ambient Bluetooth Low Energy and WiFi signals that phones, laptops and watches broadcast constantly, then run that signal activity through machine-learning models that estimate the number of people present.

The privacy stance is not a marketing footnote - it is the architecture. Device identifiers seen by a sensor are hashed on the device itself, external signals are filtered out, and duplicates are removed. Nothing personally identifiable is stored, and there is no seat-level tracking. "No PII collected, no tracking - ever," is how the company frames it, and that design has cleared enterprise IT review at hundreds of organizations, including the U.S. federal government.

The sensors themselves are deliberately dull to install. There is no lens to aim and no battery to change. The Macro sensor plugs into a standard wall outlet and covers large rooms of 400 square feet or more; the Micro sensor uses millimeter-wave sensing for small spaces like conference rooms and phone booths. For customers who would rather not add hardware at all, Occuspace can turn existing WiFi access points into occupancy sensors.

All of it feeds one web dashboard, updated around the clock, with free API exports that push the numbers into digital signage, mobile apps or a facilities team's own tools. The company says it measures the entire population of a space rather than a sample, and puts accuracy between 80% and 95% depending on room size, with larger spaces reading more accurately.

In 2013, Nic Halverson was a freshman electrical-engineering student at UC San Diego. During finals he spent about 20 minutes climbing all eight floors of the Geisel Library looking for an open seat - and never found one. "I wish I knew how busy every floor was before I came," he thought. That sentence became a product.

In 2017 Halverson launched the company with two roommates, Linus Grasel and Max Topolsky, through UC San Diego's startup incubator known as "The Basement." The first version was a free app called Waitz that showed students how busy campus libraries, gyms and dining halls were in real time. It hit 10,000 downloads in a single week, and a UCSD vice chancellor asked the team to deploy across the university's entire four-million-square-foot campus.

The university handed the founders two hard constraints that ended up defining the company: collect no personal data, and require no complex infrastructure. Those rules pushed the team toward the anonymous, plug-in, signal-based design that Occuspace still sells today. The consumer app - now the front door for higher education - kept the Waitz name; the company rebranded to Occuspace as it grew into enterprise and government buildings.

"The story of how I got started with Occuspace really was a result of my growing up in a small Florida town with a population of about 4,000 people," Halverson has said. He is candid about the cost of building it: "Turns out that starting a company is hard - really hard. There is sacrifice of sleep, relationships, vacations, financial stability."

The competitive field is crowded - Density, VergeSense, Butlr, XY Sense and others all sell occupancy data. Occuspace's separation comes from a few deliberate choices. It never uses cameras, which removes the privacy objection that stalls camera-based systems at the IT-review stage. It measures the whole population of a room rather than sampling a fraction. And it competes hard on cost, claiming a total cost of ownership three to five times lower than camera systems, with cloud licenses running roughly $2 to $8 per sensor per month and free API exports.

The install story matters as much as the price. Because a sensor plugs into an outlet or piggybacks on existing WiFi, a pilot can go live in days rather than quarters, and the company says most pilots pay for themselves within nine to twelve months. That combination - privacy-first, whole-population, low-friction, low-cost - is what lets Occuspace win the same building against better-funded rivals.

The business model sits on two legs: a per-sensor monthly SaaS subscription tied to the dashboard, and larger enterprise or government agreements layered on top. The free Waitz app anchors the whole thing in higher education, turning students into a built-in audience for every campus deployment.