
Launch HN: Aura Vision (YC W19) – Google Analytics for Physical Stores - jblok
We&#x27;re Daniel, Jaime, and Jonathon - the founders of Aura Vision. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;auravision.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;auravision.ai</a>)<p>Aura Vision is like Google Analytics for physical retail stores. Our mission is to ensure that physical retailers can innovate and improve their stores with data, in the same way their eCommerce counterparts do, while protecting customer privacy.<p>Retail teams often know very little about what shoppers do in-store leading up to a purchase. To try to increase sales, they change layouts, products, and media in their shops based on anecdotal knowledge, and experience. That’s because it’s hard to get good quality data about what consumers actually do in their stores at the moment. Many retailers periodically place people in doorways with clipboards recording shopper demographics and behaviours, which of course is costly and not very scalable.<p>We use existing security cameras in stores to detect the demographics (age, gender, staff&#x2F;customer) and behaviour of all visitors using our proprietary computer vision technology. This creates an anonymised feed of aggregated data for the retailer, giving them new tools to improve their stores. E.g.<p>- To increase footfall, retailers can A&#x2F;B test window displays, selecting the one with the highest peel off rate (the ratio of entries to people walking by)<p>- To uncover why a product is underselling, retailers can learn about the movement and dwell times of different demographics around products.<p>- To increase sales, they can select products that are suited to the demographics in that store.<p>- To increase conversion rates, retailers can identify where customers spend most of their time in-store and locate staff accordingly.<p>We started out in the UK during the birth of GDPR, so we’re acutely aware of the need to protect customer privacy. Video is deleted as part of the processing, and never stored thereafter, and our system never identifies people, nor stores identities. All data is aggregated into 15 minute chunks, which fully anonymises the counts, so you are left with information on the behaviours that the camera observed in that period. Those chunks are supplied back to the retailer through our dashboard and API as heatmaps and counts. We don’t rely on facial recognition, instead taking in visual cues from all features across the body.<p>In contrast many other retail tracking solutions, like Bluetooth and WiFi, aren’t GDPR compliant as they store MAC addresses, or other phone IDs without consent, which count as personal data. This means they can re-identify you when you come back to the store, or another store on their network. While regulation will do a good job at getting rid of these tracking solutions, we want to help by showing retailers there’s an option that gives them more useful data anyway.<p>Daniel and Jaime studied under the same supervisor at the University of Southampton during their computer vision PhDs. They saw plenty of opportunities for using deep learning in people tracking. A key part of Daniel&#x27;s PhD was estimating people&#x27;s demographics from CCTV footage and this led to the end result we are running now. Myself and Daniel went to primary school together, and my background is in APIs and frontends.<p>Thanks for reading! We know the HN community has many people interested and knowledgeable in computer vision and deep learning, so we&#x27;re looking forward to hearing your thoughts. If you or someone you know has experienced similar challenges in retail, please reach out! jonathon@auravision.ai
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nathanlee
While at a major beverage brand conglomerate, I used to be interested in this
kind of data.

We had various projects that helped us gain insights on consumers from hiring
agents, observing camera footage, tracking SKU sales & out-of-stocks, and use
of beacons.

Every major FMCG company I've worked with already uses some tech vendor for
segmented footfall model to drive placements of branded displays and
promotional space.

We did run into real challenges conducting A/B tests in the retail environment
though. Unlike with web apps where A/B tests are easily deployed and measured
with analytics, in the retail environment, its hard to effectively measure
success of A/B tests and attribute shopper motivation. Say if an A/B test is
conducted on whether a retail display will drive sales of SKU's we'd need to
be able to attribute sales against those SKU's. The challenge is that a FMCG
company will try to place new products everywhere around the store and only on
paid-for displays so it'll be hard to assess the success. Can you also track
where in the store a product was picked into a cart?

What I think is an interesting angle you guys have is that you integrate with
existing hardware/ security cameras in stores. Solutions sold to me required
us to install new cameras to gain insights on our brand's aisles. It may help
your go-to-market to partner with major security camera companies (like
Avigilon [http://avigilon.com/](http://avigilon.com/)) to sell your document
as a part of a bundle.

~~~
dan0net
Thanks Nathanlee, it’s great to hear about your experience in FMCG and some of
the challenges you faced around A/B testing layouts and integrating sensors,
I’d love to pick up a conversation with you about this.

We’re currently focused on speciality retail, especially where the store is
more of a ‘show-room’ style such that product layouts and window displays can
be more easily configured. We’re also considering partnerships with camera
manufacturers as this is on our roadmap, but not mandatory at this stage as we
integrate with any IP-camera system.

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ctoth
So many people talking about what a good idea this is, or how it has already
been done or ...

Absolutely nobody talking about ... if we really, as consumers, want to be
tracked everywhere all the time always.

Do you just assume that there's no way to stop it so might as well nerd out
over it?

This is ... So weird, considering how HN usually treats privacy.

I hope this company, and every company trying to track me both on and offline
are destroyed by strong data privacy legislation.

Enough is enough.

~~~
michaelvoz
When you enter a private business, they have every right to track you as they
wish.

~~~
ctoth
So why don't they send a person to follow me around, noting down specifics
like what clothing I look at and how many seconds I take to poop? Because this
would be __creepy __

But since they 're doing it with invisible technology that most people don't
know about, it's okay, right?

Wrong.

Furthermore, just as when the government does it, there is a qualitative, not
merely quantitative difference between individualized data collection and
total aggregation. It's legal for the cops to tail a suspect. IT's not legal
for the cops to put a tracking device on everybody's car just in case.

And finally, a business may legally be able to track me in their own store,
but where is my assurance that those data are not shared with other
businesses, ones that I may not have entered?

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aresant
There are DOZENS of companies after this space with solutions ranging from
point-of-sale, to beacons (facebook was aggressively rolling into this space,
have heard less after privacy missteps), to WIFI range tracking, to some combo
of the above.

Aura is a "smack self on forehead" level of ingenuity / execution - I love it,
think you guys are on to something big. Look at the institutional market too -
literally an analytics dashboard / workflow that provides forward looking
reporting on traffic / trending would be hugely valuable to REIT scale funds.

~~~
reaperducer
_There are DOZENS of companies after this space with solutions ranging from
point-of-sale, to beacons (facebook was aggressively rolling into this space,
have heard less after privacy missteps), to WIFI range tracking, to some combo
of the above_

To add to your point, Walgreens is already using facial recognition to profile
customers.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-tests-digital-
cooler-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-tests-digital-cooler-doors-
with-cameras-to-target-you-with-ads-11547206200)

~~~
rapnie
Thanks. Have to avoid them from now on.

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bilifuduo
This is cool! There was a very similar startup, Prayas Analytics, that also
went through YC (in 2015) and ended up shutting down:
[https://medium.com/@pranshum/10-lessons-on-3-years-with-
pray...](https://medium.com/@pranshum/10-lessons-on-3-years-with-
prayas-31cdaf893b40)

Curious to hear your thoughts on what's different this time around?

~~~
jblok
Interesting questions - we haven't actually come across them before so I'm
just going on what I learnt from that blog post, and I may not have the
greatest appreciation for their specifics.

\- Our strategy is to not start with large grocery retailers for the exact
reasons they mention. They're slow to implement new tech and slow to change
things in stores. Our primary target is mid to large-size speciality
retailers, with low conversion rates, where a small change in conversion rate
can have a big effect on sales.

\- We've honed our camera integration and have made installation easy and fast
with existing cameras. Our clients have even done the install themselves
before.

\- The post talks about the stores needing to actually make use of the data
and our plan for this is to help them do the things they change up semi-
regularly anyway (product layouts, visual merchandising, window displays)

\- With data transfer, we try not to use the stores WiFi if possible, and use
3G dongles instead. We've managed to use new compression algos so we don't use
a huge amount of bandwidth

~~~
Robin_Message
Meta: I'm fascinated you've gotten as far as launching without anyone at YC
mentioning a company doing something so similar three years ago. Seems like a
failure on YC's part; maybe they thought there was nothing to learn from the
other company but still seems surprising.

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plahteenlahti
Your explanation on how you plan to keep the data anonymised sounds good. I
also love that you’re using existing cameras, I recently observed as a large
it-consultancy piloted their multi-camera solution with a large Finnish
grocery store chain and got rather poor results, mainly due to cost and amount
work being too high when compared to the results.

This also instantly reminded me of the time I used to work in large thrift
shop. Everyday the owner would count the daily visitors and compare it and the
daily sales number to factors such as the amount of tables, changes in floor
plans, amount of new items etc. He would have loved something like this.

Good luck with your product!

~~~
dan0net
Thanks for the kind words plahteenlahti - it would be great to hear about your
experience with the groccery store, what kind of data were they experience
poor results from, was this because the data was poor quality / inaccurate, or
simply due to not getting return once acted on?

------
epberry
First, the negatives. This space is enormously difficult. You have low margin,
low technology clients with physical infrastructure. You have to get approval
from operations, IT, and legal. Once you're up and running the data becomes
stale fast and you have to produce insights like move this shelf here. Then
you have to wait for them to do that, if they ever do, and demonstrate that
the client is now seeing a ROI from that change. And prove it was you and not
the new ad campaign they just ran or the better staff they have in place now
that is making them slightly more money. I've been working in this area for
years, also with a computer vision research background, also read Prayas's
post several years ago and dismissed it, also started with specialty retail
and focused on ease of install, also dismissed RetailNext for using their own
hardware, etc.

Phew. Now, the positives! I do believe that someone will crack this at some
point. There are several promising trends including a massive jump in the
share of IP camera installs, massive drop in the price/performance ratio of
GPUs, and steady increase in commercial broadband. And everybody loves data.
Those trends, plus a pivot to optimizing physical business processes, are why
I'm still working on camera software at my company, Perceive
(www.perceiveinc.com). We got an interview at YC several years ago for this
idea but were rejected.

So Jonathon and team, despite how this post started, I really do wish you guys
the best. Your tech looks really good. I would love to talk.

------
musicale
"Our mission is to ensure that physical retailers can innovate and improve
their stores with data, in the same way their eCommerce counterparts do, while
protecting customer privacy."

Unfortunately "the same way their eCommerce counterparts do" is by violating
customer privacy.

The only reliable way to protect customer privacy is simply to not collect the
video and other data in the first place.

------
conanbatt
I gotta be honest, this doesn't look to great to me. Most stores, mid-to-low
grocery stores, dont even track inventory completely automatically, let alone
something as sophisticated at this.

How are you going to beat amazon that has expertise and actual stores to try
this? Where is the tech break-through going to happen without that
instantaneous feedback loop?

But going back to the first point..have you talked to target stores? I can't
imagine them wanting to sign up on something that has very undefined value,
potentially large backlash. They have much bigger problems on their day to
day.

~~~
jblok
Amazon are currently more focussed on supplying services to developers through
AWS, e.g. Rekognition that do one small, technical part of what we do. That
and Amazon Go which is a cool concept that works really well for
groceries/convenience stores. We're going after everything else and don't see
Amazon making any moves to enter this space in the near future.

We've talked to lots of target stores and are live with a number of clients
already. The story we hear most frequently is that they've previously tried a
number of things to get this type of data but none have been good enough in
terms of precision or depth of insight.

~~~
conanbatt
Good luck!

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yc-kraln
I joined a company with exactly this pitch in 2012. In 2016, I acquired a
company with this pitch as part of a major international Telco. I have built a
prototype of this technology and run a pilot with a major international
conference venue.

The stores aren't interested in your aggregated data, and they wouldn't know
how to use it even if they were. They're interested in insights which you
can't have, because you don't know their business. You're not delivering
enough value to make a business. Sorry.

~~~
anitil
I'd love to hear more about your reasoning. Obviously metrics and dashboards
are shiny CTO-bait, but what would people be looking for in terms of business
outcomes?

Like, could you do this on a consulting basis, where you run something like
Aura Vision in store for a few tests, then come up with a business report?

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mlevental
the real value to be captured isn't footfall and such because the real
efficiency of e-commerce isn't a-b t testing; it's retargeting. Amazon go and
their competitors are solving this problem
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs).
I'm sure you're aiming at the same thing though.

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neuralRiot
Time to go back to my neighborhood grocery store where when i need some
product he doesn't carry i talk to him and he will have it a few days later. I
used to love technology and that's why i choose this field but now i feel it
asphyxiating and that makes me sad, perhaps i'm just getting old.

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nurgasemetey
There is also one company called
V-Count([https://v-count.com/](https://v-count.com/))

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kayhi
Pricing?

~~~
pknerd
your privacy.

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n_plus_one
How do you process the video? On prem in a box or through the cloud? How do
you deal with bandwidth concerns of retailers?

