Our Story:
From a Crowded Library to a Global Solution
It all started in 2017 with a problem every student knows. Nic Halverson, an engineering student at UC San Diego, walked into the library and spent 20 minutes searching for a single open seat. He found nothing.
Frustrated, he told his friend and fellow engineer, Linus Grasel, "I wish I knew how busy it was before I walked all the way over here."
That simple wish became the spark for Occuspace. What began as a fun hardware project to build their resumes soon took on a life of its own. When they pitched their idea to the university, the campus departments were interested but gave them two non-negotiable constraints: their solution could not collect any personally identifiable information (PII), and it couldn't require any complex infrastructure changes to deploy.
Challenge accepted. After a year of development, Nic and Linus created a revolutionary sensor: a simple, plug-in device that could measure a 3,000-square-foot space with 95% accuracy using anonymous Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals.
They launched a free app for students, made a single Facebook post, and waited. The results were stunning: 10,000 downloads in the first week, with nearly a third of the entire student body using the app.
But the real "aha!" moment came two weeks later, when the Vice Chancellor called. "How do you have this data for my buildings?" he asked. "I’m spending over a billion dollars on construction and have no real idea how our spaces are being used. Can you deploy this across our entire 4 million square foot portfolio?"
In that moment, Nic and Linus realized what they had stumbled upon. In the digital world, analytics are standard practice. In the physical world, most decisions were still based on assumptions and anecdotes. By solving a student's simple problem under strict privacy and simplicity constraints, they had accidentally built the world's most affordable, scalable, and privacy-safe solution for understanding physical space.
Our Mission:
Making Data Simple and Actionable
That discovery defined our purpose. We believe unlocking the potential of our physical world shouldn't be complex. Our mission is to make it simple to collect and act on space utilization data, empowering organizations everywhere to move from guesswork to confidence.
Our Vision:
A World Where Space Works for People and the Planet
We envision a future where every physical space is intelligent. A world where data-informed decisions lead to more efficient buildings, massive operational savings, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and better experiences for the people inside them. Real estate is one of the world's least efficient asset classes, simply because you can't improve what you don't measure. We are changing that.
