Best Startup
Aura Vision helps retail stores to maximise the value of every customer, using our cutting-edge AI and retailers’ existing CCTV infrastructure.
Tell us about yourself?
Aura Vision co-founders Dr. Jaime Lomeli and Dr. Daniel Martinho-Corbishley founded the business during their PhDs in Machine Learning and Computer Vision after discovering their ground-breaking technology that can detect, track and estimate the demographics of large numbers of people from existing CCTV streams without needing to use facial recognition.
Aura Vision is now working with the world’s largest retailers and is still the only available solution available on the market with this technology, made possible through the founders’ combined experience in embedded systems, AI and retail.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Sales isn’t about convincing people to buy. Sales is about finding people with a problem worth solving. Humanize the sales process and good things happen. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
What problem does your business solve?
Helping brick-and-mortar retailers with hundreds of stores to increase traffic and sales conversion across their entire retail footprints.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
While researching state-of-the-art machine learning techniques applied to CCTV footage for forensic investigation, the founders realised that they could extract highly valuable information from unconstrained security camera footage, which remains a largely untapped source of data to this day.
With their experience in retail, they saw an opportunity to apply their insights into a rapidly evolving retail industry. At present retailers are stuck with installing hundreds of costly and limited sensors that capture rather rudimentary insights from their physical stores.
Aura Vision solves this by harnessing the existing CCTV cameras in-store that can captures hundreds of insights to optimise traffic and sales, and provides a low-cost, low-footprint alternative to traditionally costly sensor solutions.
What is your magic sauce?
Unique AI that can detect, track and capture customer demographics and segment staff from customers, all without using facial recognition, mobile tracking or worn tags.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Aura Vision is helping retailers future-proof their businesses so they can rapidly evolve their experiential shopping experiences.
Our 5 year plan is to become the defacto in-store analytics solution for retailers worldwide, offer the next generation of competitive retail and consumer insights, and enable the digital the store-of-the-future.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Global pandemic shutting all stores globally for over 3 months
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’re looking for retailers who are trying to understand and improve their physical stores and industry specialists who understand the needs of retailers, find out more at auravision.ai
