SenSen raises capital and backdoors at a $36m valuation

It was great catching up with my mate Zenon yesterday at a BBG Mastermind Lunch yesterday. Zen is a founding investor and mentor of SenSen Networks.

Subhash Challa, a professor of computer systems engineering at Sydney's University Of Technology (UTS) started SenSen in 2007 and raised his initial capital  and found his founding investor at our BSI Investor forum. 

Last year it  backdoored  into a $36m ASX backdoor listing .

The technology was a spin-off of the UTS, who transferred the IP into SenSen in exchange for equity. ( A great example of how A university can commercialise its technology)

A video analytics start-up which claims its camera systems can catch as many parking cheats in a day as a council's inspectors can in a year raised $4.5 million for an ASX listing.

Its video analysis software  powers one-third of NSW's speed cameras, and counts customers for Crown Casino as well as the sizes of their bets.

It’s  ability to interpret video and manage the “big data” will hopefully scale globally.

"Video images contain so much rich, business-related information, if an algorithm can extract it and present it to you in the right way."

Applications for Councils “Robocop”

Thirteen city councils or state governments (local and overseas )  now buy SenSen's video analytics as a software-as-a-service .The automation of parking inspection has proven the most popular application with councils. Users include Manly in NSW, Brisbane, Ipswich and Logan in Queensland, Maribyrnong in Victoria, Subiaco in WA, as well as Calgary, Copenhagen and Singapore.

SenSen puts its software behind existing CCTV cameras (or installs its own where necessary) and uses character recognition to 'read' every parking sign and audit every zone in the customers' desired area. Its algorithms can then apply the appropriate rule to cars interacting with the zones.

In a  test for one council, SenSen Networks notified the client of every breach its system detected in a single day, as minor as a one-second stop in a no stopping zone. The fine revenue that could have been raised exceeded what the council's human inspectors had booked in the entire previous year, Mr Challa claimed..

Video analytics for casinos 

Gambling has become SenSen Networks' other focus. It convinced Melbourne's Crown Casino to install Microsoft Kinect cameras, which are single point cameras capable of detecting three dimensions.

"That's allowed us to detect the heights of chip stacks, which we can marry with the chip colour information to calculate how much is being bet," Mr Challa said.

Crown is using the information to determine in real time which games it should be running in which areas of the casino. The system can also recognise patrons' faces and ensure they have earned an appropriate number of loyalty points.

James Packer's business had helped SenSen develop the gambling offering to the extent it will receive a royalty on sales to casinos elsewhere, Mr Challa said.

Self driving cars

Imagine the analytics that SenSen can capture and analyse tlfrom the data obtained from self driving cars. 

Onwards and Upwards

We at BSI are looking forward to follow the progress of Subhesh and the SenSen team! Well done!