Pathr Secures Venture Funding

Pathr.ai, the industry's first and only Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Spatial Intelligence platform, announced it has secured financial backing from E14 Fund, an early stage, seed fund focused on start-ups emanating out of the MIT community. The proprietary Pathr™ "behavior engine," which was founded earlier this year by Media Lab alumnus George Shaw, taps anonymous location data to drive real-time business and operational insights. The source-agnostic technology helps revenue-based (as well as non-commercial) organizations maximize profits and streamline efficiencies by more deeply evaluating how customer and constituent movement through the many physical spaces critical to operations (such as a retail store floor, warehouse, sports venue, bank, casino or municipal location) can impact success.

"The mission of the E14 Fund is to build and invest in the MIT Media Lab community-taking innovative, promising ventures to the next level," said Calvin Chin, E14 Fund Managing Partner. "Pathr is exactly the type of company that directly meshes with E14 Fund's ethos of assisting visionary tech brands in achieving strong market deployment, and then effectively scaling to meet demand. Pathr CEO George Shaw first germinated the concept behind the company while at MIT. He has since understood how to commercialize it through a multi-disciplinary, multi-industry application that we believe will have true disruptive impact within the field of location-based data and spatial analysis."

Pathr's Machine Learning (ML) tools read existing location-based sensors to derive valuable customer behavior knowledge through analysis of predictive algorithms. The Pathr platform requires no new or retrofitted hardware and works across a host of vertical industries-mapping patron, employee, object and even robot movement. Data is retrieved and delivered in real time-allowing company managers to interact with customers and staff to impact in-venue activities as they occur (not after the fact, when spatial intelligence is less useful). Customer, employee and object movement is represented only as a graphic "dot" on a digital user interface, making Pathr's behavior evaluation 100% privacy compliant.

The upside: Businesses and organizations can obtain actionable insights-and then intervene to improve the customer/patron experience. (Examples: Assisting a shopper with added information along their Path-to-Purchase; intervening to offer an in-store banking customer a limited-time incentive offer to open a new savings account; or streamlining widget/robot interactions along the warehouse-to-loading dock supply chain). The potential application for the Pathr technology to positively influence any number of profit drivers and operational efficiencies, across a diverse range of physical locations, is virtually limitless.

"E14 Fund is an ideal partner for the Pathr brand at this stage of our technology development and market rollout," said George Shaw, Founder and CEO of Pathr. "Because of the fund's 'deploy and scale' philosophy, they mesh exactly with our own journey to strategically develop our brand and help to shape the emerging spatial analytics industry. We were specifically looking for a funding partner that could help us to effectively scale to the next level and that also had deep technology experience. The E14 Fund team is an optimal fit-and we're confident they can provide the necessary financial and advisory support to help the Pathr platform grow and thrive."

Pathr will utilize this funding round to develop its technology infrastructure, enhance commercialization of the platform, and augment business development and use case applications. The brand will exhibit at next week's invitation-only Innovation Lab (Booth #7004) during the 2020 National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show, January 12-14th, at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. For more information, or to schedule a live demo during Innovation Lab, please visit Pathr.ai.

About Pathr™
Based in Mountain View, CA, Pathr's proprietary Spatial Intelligence platform and "behavior engine" delivers valuable spatial analytics and customer behavior knowledge, derived from predictive algorithms and advanced data analysis. The technology helps businesses and organizations create higher quality interactions with key constituents-by mapping and evaluating their physical movement through any number of locations or venues. Because it operates in real time, Pathr has the ability to directly impact business outcomes as they occur, during the moments most essential to an organization's financial and operational success.

About E14 Fund
E14 Fund is an early stage venture fund focused on startups founded by the MIT community. The investment fund is focused on taking the biggest ideas hatched at MIT, deploying them to the real world, and scaling them for greatest impact. The fund achieves this by serving the Media Lab community of students, faculty, members and alumni and by investing capital into their aspiring companies.