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Glimpse's solution allows brick-and-mortar retailers to gain insights into customers through its retail analytics platform

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Audience analytics technology company Glimpse is preparing to expand as the company has set its sights on a 2 million euro financing round.

The Dublin-based company was founded by Oran Mulvey and Shane O'Sullivan, and plans to increase the number of employees from the current 6 to 40 in the next three years to target the UK market. The new jobs will be mainly located in Ireland, where the company develops, but a small number of sales and support jobs will be created locally.

This round of financing will bring the company's total funds raised to more than 2.5 million euros. The previous backers include the team behind the computer vision technology company Movidius, and the retail technology expert Charles Bibby who co-founded Pointy with Mark Cummins. Its customers include Honeywell, Grafton Group and Chadwick.

This additional funding is expected to initiate Glimpse's efforts to raise its valuation and eventually target the US market, which was previously shelved due to the closure of non-essential retailers in various markets due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Glimpse's solution allows brick-and-mortar retailers to gain insight into customers through its retail analytics platform, which combines hardware and software to anonymously capture customer data. This provides retailers with similar insights to their e-commerce competitors.

"A big problem in the retail industry right now is that e-commerce is beating them. One of the main reasons is data; e-commerce sites can make changes very quickly because they can understand bounce rates, where people are looking online, and what they haven’t viewed Location," Mr. Malvey said.

"We installed this hardware-software combination above the front door of the retailer. It has two technologies. The first is video analysis. When people walk in, it will be based on traffic, age, gender, activities around the store, staying Categorize them by time and product engagement.

"The second technology listens to anonymous signals broadcast by mobile phones. This allows us to understand the approximate time people spend on the site, that is, the duration and loyalty of the store."

This information can also be combined with retail systems to measure customer consumption and purchases.

However, it is also designed to protect customer privacy, using facial detection models to identify the age and gender of shoppers, rather than assigning images to specific people's facial recognition.

The face data is processed on the Glimpse device and will not be saved. The phone identifier is completed by obtaining the unique identifier of the wifi device linked to the smart phone.

Combined, it can provide retailers with a powerful tool for more accurate positioning of their customers. Current competitors usually install more sophisticated solutions to provide traffic data. The Glimpse solution has a built-in SIM card that can transfer data to an online platform, and retailers simply plug it in and leave.

Mr. O'Sullivan said: "For many years, this has been a blank, and this blank is trying to be filled with an old-fashioned passenger flow counter, which is like an infrared beam, coming in and out." "We have developed a technology that can Provide the same level of reliable shopper data (except for physical stores), and is completely independent of all their existing infrastructure."

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