The Panoptyc Story

Micro Market operators ask me all the time, “Mac, how did you get into this?” By “this”, they typically mean Panoptyc detecting theft and operational efficiency opportunities in micro markets/unattended retail using smart cameras and artificial intelligence tools.

And here’s my answer: The journey began a few years ago when I was the manager for the men’s basketball team at The University of Colorado (Go Buffs!). I was the biggest basketball fan in the world, so the opportunity to be a part of a premier college basketball team was surreal and a dream come true. The job consisted of rebounding made shots after practice and passing in drills, but mostly, it involved combing through hours of footage, condensing game footage into just the most important events. As I reviewed this footage mindlessly, I realized that the job was quite simple. At the time, I was taking classes on artificial intelligence and thought, “maybe a computer can do this” and I won’t have to review so much footage! So I found the smartest computer science students I knew and we set out to build that product. Months later, we had built a prototype. A year later, we had raised capital and secured letters of intent from premier college basketball teams like Northwestern, South Carolina, and Eastern Washington and interest from NBA teams like the Denver Nuggets.

As we got further down the road of prototype closer to a commercial-level product as students in college with limited time, competitors and incumbents outpaced us and gained mass adoption in the market. We realized that the clock had struck midnight on our Cinderella story as the great announcer Dickie V would say. But for me, the clock was just starting to tick. In immersing myself in cutting edge computer vision and artificial intelligence technology, I learned the promise of the technology and it’s potential to revolutionize many other facets of life specifically around tedious video review. So when a family friend approached me about how AI technology could help his industry- micro markets- I was ecstatic about such a great opportunity to apply my technology background to help a strong and growing industry.

If you’re a micro market operator who has waded through hours of footage looking for theft, you can probably see where this is going. We have applied some of the same technology that allowed us to understand a basketball game with artificial intelligence to understand what happens in a micro market. It turns out that detecting if a basketball is stolen isn’t so different from detecting if a candy bar is stolen.