Draft:Butlr Technologies

Butlr Technologies is an American technology company and artificial intelligence engineering firm. The company was established in 2019 as an artificial intelligence product innovation spinoff of Silicon Valley and Boston-based research collective MIT Media Lab. A lab for the Butlr Technologies offshoot was opened in San Francisco on the west coast, while their east coast locality remained in Boston. Computational and Industrial designers and entrepreneurs Honhao Deng and Jiani Zeng founded the company, CEO and CPO respectively, as a partnership of inventors doing research at MIT with centralized investments including explorations in multi-media 3-D printing. It was under Butlr Technologies that Deng and Zeng begun developing artificial intelligence software devices. The company has since manufactured products that employ artificial intelligence to analyze thermal temperature readings of human body heat to track location data and body posture in real-time.

In 2022, Deng and Zeng were manufacturing industry candidacy recipients on Forbes annual “30 under 30” list for their business in technology innovations. “Butler’s patented technology is now being deployed for fall detection in senior living facilities and to help people age in peace,” Forbes writes. Deng served on the panel of judges for the list’s 2024 release.

In 2019, the research in technology at MIT Media Lab eventually led Deng and Zeng to the conceptualization of Butlr Technologies. The company intent was to manufacture device software that functions as intelligence insights into the relationship that human beings have to their built environments by a process of collecting and analyzing the behavior of the area occupants.

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ceiling-mount devices with thermal sensing to, in real-time, track the body heat and posture of shoppers without violating privacy. These devices were developed to help businesses understand how their clients navigate the store, as well as observe the interests of clients based on where they gravitate, as well as where there’s hesitancy. These devices also function to sense the bodily comfortability of temperature in these spaces’ in reference to the heating and cooling system operational settings, extending overseers knowing control over the best appropriated thermal climate of client need. The application of this function had been a cousin to the primary focus of Diffusive Geometries, Zeng’s prior project with an aim to “sculpt microclimates in architectural space,” which shared sentiment in having control over the weather of indoor spaces. Diffusive Geometries had explored this gain by suggesting employment of water vapor.

By February 2020, Butlr Technologies began the manufacturing and test run of the envisioned product prototype, which Deng and Zeng would name Heatic. [ref] Heatic was introduced to the [technological] manufacturing and industry sector as an artificial intelligence tool that intended to analyze consumer predictability and monitor human traffic in foundational, commercial environments in real-time. The software device that they had produced was globally financed to buyers as wireless, mounted human-oversight thermal sensing devices with A.I. analysis software that would analyze consumer interests, comfortability, and movement trajectory by observing patterns of consumer body heat and posture. Individuals acting as part of a collective of day-to-day shoppers were to be, as a collective, tracked by mounted Heatic devices in real time.

In response to the ongoing Coronoavirus Pandemic of the same year, Deng and Zeng began reworking Heatic’s developmental direction to be devices of particular interest to commercial business managements that would assist in overseeing human occupant within the commercial environment. TechCrunch quotes Deng, “the sensors can make sure no more than the allowed number of people can be in a store at once, and make sure that staff are protected from customers by helping enforce social distancing rules,” including applications that allow for customers understanding of when the best time is to visit based on the data live-reported by the device. According to the article, Butlr was able to $1.2 million in seed funding for this pivot in technology and marketed the device to owners of commercial real-estate globally.