Prism Skylabs raises $7.5 million

SAN FRANCISCO—Prism Skylabs, a startup company that "leverages data from existing video surveillance cameras to unlock information on customer patterns, trends and behaviors," on Oct. 16 announced it had raised another $7.5 million in funding.

Company founder Steve Russell, also founder of 3VR, launched Prism Skylabs in August 2011.

Prism Skylab's service will be available for download in November. For the past year, “we've been in invite-only use, working with select large and important retail and CPG [consumer product goods] companies,” Russell said.

Prism raised $1.5 million in seed money from SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt, Aaron Patzer, Brad Garlinghouse, CrunchFund and others in August 2011. This Series A round is led by new investors Triangle Peak Partners and Pacific Partners, and joined by Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Eagle, MkII Ventures, SeriesG and Data Collective.

Prism Skylabs is a "cloud-based service that allows business owners to bring video feeds online, capture images from these feeds and share that data with consumers and the public."

While the technology has many applications, it has received tremendous interest “from the largest and most innovative retailers and distributed customer-centric businesses on the planet,” Russell said.

The Series A funding will help that set of customers "transform existing video assets into new tools for marketing and merchandising, while still providing unlimited storage and mobile access for security professionals," Russell said.

Retailers can share information throughout their organization and with channel partners as well, he explained. As an example, he said where previously a retailer might run an “expensive test” with two stores comparing two different designs, Prism Skylabs' service will enable that retailer to gain that kind of comparison information and insight “hundreds of times a day … and push that insight down into the organization. The impact is more profound.”