Density raises $51M Series C led by Kleiner Perkins (opens in new tab)

I have to admit, more and more I read about things on HN and just reason "ah this is tech beyond my grasp, and it makes sense to someone somewhere but not me". Lots of developer tools for languages I've not heard of or libraries that seem so remote and arcane I wonder who is using them.

Now in this case, it is solving a real problem, with a clear way to make money. Go Density Go.

Do you worry that you're taking money at a valuation that's predicated on artificially and transiently elevated demand? It doesn't sound like you have a business compatible with the VC hyper-growth model, outside of the present extraordinary circumstances.

It also feels intuitively like many person counting use cases are satisfactorily addressed by far simpler and lower cost heuristics such as, for example, Google lining up device 'throughput' with lat/long and business records. In fact, I just used their estimate to time my visit to the DMV and it worked perfectly.

Admittedly, it may just be that I'm not creative enough to envision sustainable, valuable use cases for this. But if you've been around 6 (?) years and just took $51M in Series C without being significantly diluted, KP is presumably assigning you at least a $250M valuation and possibly a lot higher. After accounting for terms like e.g. liquidation preference, the economic picture of Density could easily be a house of cards.

I remember when this was a Show HN, it was my first comment to say that the homepage didn't work for me in an old version of Firefox (and the developers reached out, thanked me for the report, and fixed the problem).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878597

Now so many businesses needs to count capacity, and they're perfectly positioned with 5 years of experience in the space. Amazing foresight (and/or a bit of luck).

From density.io:

> Unlike other systems, Density is anonymous at source. We can't fingerprint or track you if we wanted to.

I wonder how true this statement is, given how accurately we can now identify people based on just their walking gait – see "Human Gait Recognition Based on Gait Energy" paper[1].

The 'sensor' view on density.io that attempts to illustrate this point appears to convey just as much as the sample images in the paper.

[1] https://ijsr.net/archive/v5i11/ART20163043.pdf

This is a great example of taking an innovation and positioning it as a solution to a real, painful, and timely business problem.

Many startups in their place try to come up with some original messaging and as a result overcomplicate everything. Density keeps it simple: "Count people."

I don't understand why this can't already be done with CCTV cameras. There's obvious privacy concerns, but we already have CCTV. We are already recorded. Why do you need a special device when you could just count people on camera.

Oh man, I remember about 10 years I got so annoyed with my buys-ass gym and having to wait in line to use a machine that I came up with the idea to track real-time gym attendance and machine usage. It was going to be called WaitLift. It never went further than that awesome name.

I wonder how much more accurate this solution is compared to a simple IR beam across the entry. Is the extra HW and SW complexity needed to implement a computer vision solution worth the increase accuracy? I suppose the answer would depend on the use case. Mom-and-pop shops might only need an IR beam, if that, while megacorps that optimize costs down to the penny might have use for exact customer trends so they can decide how much human workforce and/or automation they need.

> We reasoned, if a solution didn't already exist — which surely it must — it shouldn't be more than a weekend project. How hard could it be to count people?

Not sure if this is really what happened (no reason not to trust them; but sometimes founders' stories are rewritten), but it's just so cool to start like that and become a large, well funded startup.

Great team with an excellent product that was able to re-position extremely well during the current COVID era. Hats off to all at Density.

Worked with this team ~8 years ago when in college at my first startup and they were a consultancy. Smart people who I learned lots from when starting out and always enjoy hearing their continued success.

On my street in SF that has a dead end, cars keep coming up looking for parking and on weekends they usually find nothing. But they get stuck turning around and cause a mess.

Could I use Density to count cars and display number of empty spots at the entrance of my street?

Obviously impressive and good timing. Congratulations.

But, I'm afraid this is what popped into my head. It must be me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqKmb7SSpTE

A pretty cool product and very useful! I hope something like this becomes super wide spread (maybe with competitors as pricing is a bit wack) so we can always know how busy our local stores etc are before heading out.

this is an awesome product. I could see tons of businesses using this to reopen safely during the pandemic. +1 for making it anonymous anti-camera

Aside: Haven't seen "Made in USA" in a long time, refreshing to see that Density hardware will be manufactured in Syracuse, NY: https://www.density.io/hardware/

Anyone know what kind of depth measurement they are making? It looks like some kind of radio widget

there's a grocery store equivalent in the UK called Crowdless

Who would need exact accuracy? Why won't people be okay with numbers which are a bit off, but much cheaper?