Startups Changing Their Business Models in Response to Covid-19

Pathr
Mountain View, California

Spatial Intelligence platform Pathr uses machine learning to understand how people navigate businesses. Because of the platform’s flexibility—it’s able to work across a variety of different environments to track anonymous location and movement data—Founder and CEO George Shaw saw an opportunity to adapt the service in response to the pandemic.

The startup recently launched a new platform to better address social distance use cases and analytics called SocialDistance.ai. The website uses Pathr’s spatial intelligence tools to better track micro-movement—the granular data that other companies tracking social distancing measures and effectiveness are not able to identify. The goal is to better identify how retailers and other business owners can operate their businesses during and after the pandemic.

“We’re not doctors or virologists or disease experts, but what we’re doing is looking to those experts to learn about viral transmissions, safe distances, and what kind of contact is bad contact so we can bake that into our spatial intelligence models,” Shaw said.

Because most stores are currently closed, the startup has created a simulator environment to allow businesses to identify how people move through their stores so they can be prepared for when they’re open.

“You can’t just let people in a store based on the square footage without knowing the flow of the store,” Shaw said. “If you allow 500 people in there, and all 500 are bottled up in the toilet paper aisle, you’ve created a big problem. If 500 people are spread evenly across your 50,000 square feet, then that’s totally fine.”