Burlington-based smart city solutions maker CIMCON raised $33 million in a Series C round led by Digital Alpha. The round included $23 million in equity and a $10 million revenue-sharing facility. Energy Impact Partners also participated in the round.
CIMCON, short for "city information management and control," started off in 2012 by offering outdoor lighting technology to make street lights more efficient. Today, the company bills itself as a smart cities technology provider making IoT solutions for outdoor uses.
The company's CEO Anil Agrawal noted that CIMCON's flagship product, NearSky, connects a city's outdoor assets such as parking spots, street lights and fire hydrants with a video camera to collect data on a range of things, including pedestrian traffic, air quality, gun safety and more.
The company will use the new financing to enhance its tech capabilities to include facial recognition, emotion detection and better analysis of its video feeds.
Agrawal said funds from this round will bolster CIMCON's partnerships with device companies and video analytics providers to better monetize the collected data.
"We are working with camera companies, video analysis companies and app developers to create products for our NearSky platform," he said. "We want to become a marketplace that cities can buy products from."
The funding comes to CIMCON, whose technology is deployed in 170 cities across 24 countries, at a time when cities are taking a stringent stance on surveillance tools like facial recognition.
San Francisco and Oakland in California and Somerville in Massachusetts have banned their city departments from using facial recognition tools. This technology identifies people from live or recorded video captured from cameras installed at public spaces and compares their facial features to identify individuals from a database of faces, such as mugshots.
Cities that have banned facial recognition technology have expressed concern for its potential to misidentify individuals—not to mention the fundamental privacy concerns that come in tow.
This is front of mind for Agrawal. He said CIMCON doesn't store any of the footage collected on the cloud; instead, all data processing happens at the location.
"From our perspective, we are only trying to alert the city of certain things," Agrawal said. "We are not using the data to profile people. If we see something on the street like crowd aggression or people carrying guns, we alert the authorities."
Agrawal said his company is working with partners to "expand the safety circle and take it outdoors."
CIMCON, which has offices in Burlington and India, employs a staff of about 150 people. It plans to hire locally for roles in artificial intelligence, machine learning, sales and customer development.
