Obsity It is a French startup that develops sensors for city centers that are easy to install and maintain. This hardware module serves as the cornerstone of Upciti’s data management platform for local governments.
Unlike traditional security cameras, Upciti is designed with privacy in mind. The startup focuses on using data to guide public policies, not data surveillance.
The company secured new funding worth $7.5 million (7 million euros) this summer. Point Nine and Chalfen Ventures are leading the round, with participation from existing investors Demeter and Innovacom. As part of this round, the startup raised €6 million in a traditional startup funding round and €1 million in debt.
When I spoke with Upciti’s founder and CEO, Jean-Baptiste Poliac, what struck me was that the startup relies on some strong principles and design choices. This has influenced product design and shows how a smart city company can help cities and respect everyone’s privacy at the same time.
Upciti originally started with a simple problem. When you drive in a dense urban area, it can be difficult to find a parking space. The team tried to collect data using different sensors, including ground sensors, infrared sensors, etc.
“But there was nothing that could be spread over an entire city. You could do bits and pieces here and there, but every time you had to ask for a building permit, you had to dig the ground – it was like hell,” Jean-Baptiste Bouliac told me.
Soon after, the company realized that it would be easier to use the camera on lampposts. But Upciti didn’t choose just any camera. The startup uses low-resolution, ultra-wide-angle cameras so it can cover a large area of ground with a single camera.
Why didn’t Upciti rely on existing security cameras? “It’s limiting because there aren’t security cameras everywhere,” Poliak said. “And there’s a big problem because we thought regulations would change and prevent us from collecting 4K images of the street with faces, license plates, cars — where you can recognize everything.”
Using Upciti’s low-resolution cameras, the company can’t recognize faces, read license plates, or even identify the make of a car. “This is what we call privacy by design. Even if we go crazy tomorrow and sell our company to North Korea, the images you can get from this are like postage stamps, the face is 0.5 pixels,” Polyak said.
But using these sensors, Upciti sensors can determine whether a vehicle is a car or a delivery truck. These hardware units can also count pedestrians crossing the street somewhere. Everything is processed directly on the street sensors. The images themselves do not leave the lampposts. Upciti only collects text data over a cellular connection.
“That’s why we created our own devices. It’s not because we want to make devices, because frankly, if we could do without them, we wouldn’t have made our own devices,” Poliak said. “But this way we will be able to spread our solution everywhere, and “We don’t have to worry about advertising the cameras and we can focus on one installation point managed by one entity – public lighting.”
Platform play
Small cities typically don’t have a data strategy. They work with many providers, but there is no single source of truth where data is stored and can be reused for other services. Cities may have lakes and warehouses, but not a data lake or data warehouse.
Upciti’s data collection sensors are just the first step of a larger strategy for the platform. Upciti works with large cities like Monaco and Florence, but also with smaller cities like Vannes, Lorient and Fécamp – it works with 56 cities overall.
There is no single use case because cities often have different needs. For example, Upciti can collect data about parking spaces and then transmit that information to parking apps, like PayByPhone or Flowbird.
In some cases, local governments want to limit car traffic by telling people where to go to find a parking space. In other cases, local governments want to tell people that they can go downtown instead of to the mall because there are currently many empty parking spaces.
Upciti wants to go one step further and help cities create data pipelines. “In Orleans, for example, street lighting is controlled according to actual traffic conditions,” Poliak said. If more than x vehicles pass the Upciti sensor every 10 minutes, keep the lights on.
“We also count pedestrians. You might be thinking, ‘But, why?’ We have a use case in Florence, Italy, which to me is the most advanced use case. They have problems with overtourism. Basically, you can see everyone at the same time, in the same place, In the main squares of Florence. “We have prepared Florence’s squares, counted the number of people in the square, and sent the information in real time to the Florence tourism app,” Poliak said.
Then, the city can display this information to tourists and display popular times (so people can avoid them). They also use this information to send real-time offers to museums at the other end of town.
Of course, this is a use case that requires some integration with the API. Medium-sized cities do not necessarily have a development budget. That’s why Upciti also provides a ready-to-use data visualization dashboard.
Although there are hardware components, Upciti does not sell its sensors directly. It sells access to its platform, which includes hardware sensors, visual dashboard, application programming interface (API), etc.
Ultimately, Upciti could become the premier data platform for cities that don’t have one. Local governments can integrate data from other sensors and add data from open data sources. That’s why it makes sense for Upciti to raise money so it can develop its software platform.
The go-to-market strategy is very elegant. The company signs new contracts with its hardware sensors and could then become an essential vertical SaaS platform for local governments.