Oriient secures Series A funding to bring the user experience and data-driven insights of the digital world to brick and mortar buildings
You can read the original press release, as well as our feature on TechCrunch or Tech12 (Hebrew).
Tel Aviv, Israel, May 10, 2022 – Oriient (https://www.oriient.me), the company behind the world’s most advanced indoor positioning solution, announced an $11 million Series A funding round today, bringing the total investment in the company to $16 million. OurCrowd, a global venture capital equity platform with over $1 billion of assets under management (previous investments include Lemonade and Beyond Meat), participated in this round, as well as Regal Four (a Beren family venture entity), F2 Venture Capital, NGN Partners, and Future Energy Ventures. The funding will help scale implementation of Oriient to tens of thousands of locations, open new verticals, and drive global sales.
Oriient digitally transforms physical spaces with their advanced indoor positioning technology, which supports a wide array of business use cases. For retailers, Oriient enables in-store navigation (capturing revenue that would otherwise be lost due to unfound products), proximity marketing and foot traffic analytics. It also streamlines operations with route optimization and the ability to track task execution. In smart buildings, wayfinding enables a seamless user experience for visitors, and provides facility managers the visibility to enhance security and operational efficiency.
Oriient recently announced two exciting new partnerships that cement its status as a top player in their first target vertical: retail stores. One is with a grocery delivery giant. Oriient now powers in-store navigation used by shoppers at hundreds of stores in North America. The other is with Google, which makes Oriient indoor location services available on Google Cloud’s Marketplace as an SDK for retailers’ mobile apps.
“We’re very excited about Oriient’s innovative technology, and their recent high-profile retail partnerships,” said John Medved, OurCrowd’s CEO. “We’re proud to support them in bringing indoor location services to more locations worldwide, helping visitors navigate indoors accurately on their own smartphones, and the businesses to improve their service, space utilization, staff performance, and operations.”
Founded in 2017, the Tel-Aviv-based 35-person company has perfected its groundbreaking, proprietary algorithms that use Earth’s magnetic field, smartphone readings and AI to accurately pinpoint any user inside a building, without the need to install any hardware.
“When we set out to build Oriient, our vision was to create the world’s first truly software-only indoor location solution. We knew it had to be accurate, cost-effective, and scalable, and that we couldn’t compromise on those things,” says Mickey Balter, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “Thanks to previous funding, we were able to deliver on this promise and commercialize the technology. After achieving technological breakthroughs in 2021, we’ve seen great momentum in terms of adoption. This new round of funds will help us ride that momentum to the next level: illuminating all commercial buildings in the world with the visibility and data-driven insights of the digital world.”
“Oriient has an impressive team of top-notch scientists working on unique and challenging deep tech problems—they’re truly cutting edge,” says Jonathan Saacks from F2 Venture Capital. “Legacy technologies won’t be able to compete because they require hardware, which is expensive and a pain to install and maintain, and they’re simply not as accurate as Oriient. Our bet is that in a few years you’ll see Oriient in almost every indoor commercial space. We’re thrilled to be with them on this journey.”