Riverside Acceleration Capital (RAC) is excited to announce our investment in Occuspace, a California-based occupancy intelligence platform that helps organizations measure how their physical spaces are used with high accuracy, low cost, and with a focus on privacy.
For many larger organizations, real estate is an enormous capital asset and one that’s often underutilized. One of the key challenges centers around understanding how buildings, and spaces with those buildings, are actually used. This historically meant relying on labor-intensive headcounts, incomplete badge swipe data or network data, or costly camera-based systems. Teams were often left making expensive decisions about space, staffing, and building operations without a full, reliable picture of how their portfolios were being used.
Nic Halverson and Linus Grasel founded Occuspace in 2017 to help address this gap, blending proprietary Internet of Things (IoT) sensors with a powerful software platform. Their low-cost sensors can be simply plugged into a standard electrical receptacle with no IT involvement, and passively listen for smart devices. When combined with their Data Platform – which is now built on close to a decade of measurements – Occuspace can deliver an impressive headcount accuracy rate of 97%+.
Today, more than 100 organizations across North America and Europe rely on the Occuspace platform across more than 40 million square feet of managed space. The company’s technology has also been validated and selected by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) to help optimize more than 180 million square feet of federal real estate – showing their ability to operate in complex, security-sensitive environments.
Across our own portfolio we’re also seeing parallels of the wider trend in businesses wanting to encourage in-person collaboration. In this new era of hybrid work, highly accurate, real-time occupancy data becomes even more important given the variable nature of when and where people decide to work.
Beyond answering how much office space is needed, forward thinkers are considering questions like: What types of spaces do my employees like to work and collaborate in? Are the amenities in those areas appropriately resourced? Can we save operating or capital costs for areas that are underutilized?
"RAC's investment helps us keep growing fast with corporate real estate teams. We help them see how their offices are really used, so they can manage space better, lower building operating costs, and give people a better experience on site" - Occuspace Co-Founder & CEO, Nic Halverson
We believe Occuspace are well positioned to help deliver the insights needed by space planners and modern facilities teams in this new era of work, and are proud to partner with them to support their continued growth.
To learn more about Occuspace, visit www.occuspace.com.
