occupancy-analytics
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The Company That Put a Sensor on the Mousetrap
Everyone chasing smart-building glory wanted to control the thermostat. Microshare went after the mousetrap, the toilet paper roll, and the mop - and built a business on the parts of a building nobody wants to think about.
Zan Compute Put Sensors in the Restroom. Now It Wants AI to Run the Cleaning Shift.
The Santa Clara company spent a decade teaching buildings to notice an empty soap dispenser. Its next bet is harder: turning those signals into schedules, work orders and decisions that cleaning teams will actually use.
Lambent
Lambent is a Boston-based B2B software company that turns existing Wi-Fi and sensor data into anonymous, predictive occupancy and space-utilization analytics. Its SaaS platform, Lambent Spaces, helps space planners at colleges, universities and corporate campuses understand how buildings are actually used - without installing new hardware or tracking individuals - so they can make data-driven decisions about renovations, capacity, energy use and real estate. Founded in 2017 as Armored Things and rebranded to Lambent in 2022, the company works with customers including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and partners such as Siemens, Planon and HPE Aruba Networks.
Occuspace
Occuspace is a smart-building company that measures how physical spaces are actually used. Its plug-in sensors passively read ambient Bluetooth and WiFi signals - never cameras or personal data - to estimate real-time occupancy, foot traffic and dwell time, then feed the numbers into a dashboard and the free Waitz app. Founded in 2017 by three UC San Diego roommates, it now serves 100+ university campuses plus corporate and federal customers, helping them cut wasted space, save energy and plan facilities from data instead of guesswork.
Haltian
Haltian is a Finnish IoT company from Oulu that turns physical spaces into smart, sustainable environments. Founded in 2012 by former Nokia product engineers, it pairs its Thingsee wireless sensor hardware with the Empathic Building digital twin software to help offices, hospitals, warehouses and logistics sites measure occupancy, air quality and asset location - and act on the data. Having earned early fame designing the Oura smart ring, Haltian now runs one of Europe's largest IoT deployments and serves roughly 400 customers across 36 countries.
Nic Halverson
Nic Halverson is the co-founder and CEO of Occuspace, an occupancy intelligence company that reads Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals to tell buildings how busy they are without cameras. He started the company in 2017 with roommate Linus Grasel after failing to find a seat at UC San Diego's Geisel Library, and has since deployed the sensors across dozens of universities, Fortune 500 offices, and, most recently, 180 million square feet of federal real estate for the GSA.
Richard Scannell
Richard Scannell is the CEO of Lambent (formerly Armored Things), a Boston-based SaaS company that turns Wi-Fi signals and building sensors into anonymous occupancy analytics for corporate and university campuses. He took over in July 2022 as the company pivoted from securing sports venues to helping facilities managers argue with executives about whether Tuesday is really the new Monday. Before Lambent he co-founded Glasshouse Technologies, which grew to more than $100 million in revenue, and led RiverMeadow Software and Login VSI's North American operations.
R-Zero
R-Zero is a San Francisco-based smart building technology company that started in the pandemic selling hospital-grade UV-C disinfection and pivoted to an IoT and AI platform that cuts HVAC energy use 20-40% by reading real-time occupancy across commercial and healthcare portfolios.
Timo Korpela
Timo Korpela is CEO of Haltian Inc. and VP of Sales for North America at Haltian, the Finnish IoT pioneer behind the Thingsee sensor platform and the 'Empathic Building' concept. Raised under the Northern Lights in Finnish Lapland and educated at Helsinki University of Technology, he bridges the precision of Nordic engineering with the deal-making culture of Silicon Valley. Operating from Palo Alto, he drives Haltian's North American growth - a market that accounts for roughly a third of the company's revenue - while negotiating global partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, and healthcare systems across three continents.
Honghao Deng
Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.