Intel invests $15m in Prism SkyLabs

Prism Skylabs, a two-year-old startup founded by Ron Palmeri and 3VR's Steve Russell today announced a $15 million Series B funding round led by Intel Capital, Intel Corporations' investment and M&A business. The round included investments from Presidio Ventures, Triangle Peak, Data Collective, Expa, and some existing investors, Russell told me.

Prism Skylab is a cloud service that transforms any video camera “into visual merchandising, auditing and business intelligence tool that can be accessed in real time from any device.”

“On the business side, it's hard to overstate the value of having [an investor] like Intel for a company like Prism,” Russell said.

The funding round was announced today in San Diego at the 14th Annual Intel Capital Global Summit where Intel awarded a total of $65 million in funding to 16 companies.

“At this conference we are able to look at how Prism might integrate with next-gen mobile devices [as well as the possibilities, for example, of using] new techniques in a data center that will allow us to increase our performance over 100-fold.”

“The core of our business is the R&D and product work we do, and we'll continue to invest in that,” Russell said, but the bulk of the funds from this round will be used for sales and marketing.

Since its launch, Prism has “brought on a host of interesting first customers, the new challenge for the business is to continue to serve the large customers we've won already and to build out our sales and marketing team to expand [the customer base] even further.”

Prism SkyLabs has “well north of 50 customers” that include Fortune 500 companies and well-known brands that fall into the category of “large distributed retail companies.”

“We solve one or two important problems for them,” Russell said. “We provide a set of data and instruments in the real world that heretofore you could only get for online properties. … The other value we provide is allowing global brands to peek in and better manage their stores,” he added.

“It's the analytic and visual [capabilities] that are really the secret sauce,” he said.

Prism now has about 30 employees and Russell expects to double the size of the company within the next 12 months.

Prism raised $7.5 million in funding in October 2012.

“Intel Capital has long been known as a hands-on investor,” Russell said. Among the ways the investor will assist Prism include “providing networking and matchmaking [among] its truly vast portfolio [of partners].”

The Intel Summit “[has] been an incredibly productive and fun three days for us,” he said.