Amidst the current economic challenges facing the real estate market, coupled with an unprecedented transformation sweeping across the industry, property owners and patrons are confronted with the challenges of managing and harnessing their physical spaces to give their customers the best experience possible. It was against this backdrop that one PropTech startup decided to step in and help customers manage the use of their physical spaces to improve operations.

Enter Occuspace, a provider of an innovative occupancy monitoring solution that helps customers measure and optimize the use of their physical spaces to improve utilization, make informed operational decisions, reduce real estate costs, and enhance visitor experiences.

In a move to further bolster its technological offering and expand its occupancy monitoring technology solution, Occuspace announced today it has secured $3.6M in seed funding led by Okapi Venture Capital, with participation from from Cove Fund, Shadow Ventures, and Hamilton Ventures.

The investment is a sign of confidence in Occuspace’s innovative occupancy monitoring solution and the company’s capacity to reshape the paradigm of space utilization and management strategies. With its budget-friendly pricing options and pinpoint accurate foot traffic insights, Occuspace empowers proprietors and operators across diverse property types to access meticulous space utilization data encompassing entire buildings, specific floors, and even office clusters, while also offering consumer-oriented data applications.

“We are thrilled to back the Occuspace team and to help accelerate their efforts to transform the space utilization market. Occuspace’s highly accurate, frictionless, and low-cost solution explodes open the market possibilities, as the return on investment for real estate planners, managers, and retailers to manage and control their facilities like never before is extremely compelling and empowering,” said Jeff Bocan, partner at Okapi Venture Capital.

Waitz, Occuspace’s privacy-friendly IoT occupancy tracking technology and consumer iOS and Android app, enables institutions, property owners, and patrons to monitor crowd levels in a given space in real time. Occuspace customers also leverage the gathered occupancy data to optimize the use of physical areas, leading to improved operations and elevated visitor experiences.

Occuspace said that it will use the new capital infusion to accelerate growth in key channels. The funding will also help the company to enhance its business development efforts and further establish its market share with higher education customers including UC San Diego, UCLA, Columbia University, Purdue University, Boston College, Baylor University, and dozens more. The company also plans to continue expanding into the corporate office, multifamily, travel, government, and retail verticals where its product-market fit has been established.

“Since the inception of the company our mission has been to bring web analytics to the physical world, and this recent investment round will help accelerate our business reach into various sectors looking for scalable solutions to optimize space utilization,” said Nic Halverson, co-founder and CEO of Occuspace. “We are thrilled to have the support of Okapi Venture Capital, Cove Fund, Shadow Ventures, and Hamilton Ventures, whose investment has helped us to realize our potential to address the evolving spatial needs of modern businesses.”

Occuspace’s commitment to continuous technological advancement will be further fueled by this investment, enabling the company to develop and offer even more robust occupancy management and analytics solutions, such as daily visitor counts, dwell time, and new integrations into platforms that our customers are already using.

“In a time where real estate usage is undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime change, owners and occupiers alike are perplexed on space utilization,” said Matt Ohlman, CTO and general partner of Shadow Ventures. “We are excited that Occuspace is able to provide the market with unprecedented data, analytics, and insights to drive informed decision-making and completely change the way real estate decisions are made.”