https://www.breakit.se/artikel/6824/bumbee-labs-vaxlar-upp-med-12-5-miljoner-i-kassan
Stockholm-based Bumbee Labs raises SEK 12.5 million in venture capital. “Hand on heart, it was tough for us for a while,” says Staffan Liljestrand, CEO and co-founder of Bumbee Labs.
Bumbee Labs helps its customers measure visitor flows. The service works by the company setting up open Wi-Fi networks that register how many mobile phones move within a certain area. The mobile phones do not need to be connected to the networks; it is enough that they are within the network’s range.
The K25 food court in Stockholm, for example, uses the service to measure how many people are in the premises or pass by outside at different times.
The journey, however, has been far from straightforward.
Bumbee Labs ran into trouble in the summer of 2015 after the Swedish Data Protection Authority rejected the company’s service. According to the authority, the service breached the Personal Data Act. The reason at the time was that the company stored so-called MAC addresses, a kind of unique ID for each Wi-Fi chip.
“Hand on heart, it was tough for us for a while in 2015. Our lawyers had one opinion and the Data Protection Authority another. It was a year in which we built a lot and did not close many deals,” says Staffan Liljestrand, CEO and co-founder of Bumbee Labs.
But in November that same year the company finally got the thumbs up from the Swedish Data Protection Authority after it stopped storing the MAC addresses. This means the data is now sufficiently anonymised according to the authority’s rules. Since then the deals have started coming in.
Now Bumbee Labs is stepping up the pace further and raising SEK 12.5 million in venture capital from a long list of private individuals. In total the company has more than 70 people in its ownership group.
“It was a goal for us to bring in many owners. Most have experience from property development or have made their own journeys in the IT industry,” says Staffan Liljestrand.
He does not, however, want to reveal who has invested.
The new capital will be used to strengthen the sales organisation and to develop the product.
Another important point for the company going forward will be to build out more Wi-Fi networks in major cities. To begin with, the company only set up networks for customers in their own premises. Now it plans instead to find a new revenue stream by opening up traffic data in the public space.
Bumbee Labs is currently working on setting up a platform where companies can subscribe to traffic flows out on the street. This could be used, for example, by large retailers planning where their next store should be located.
“If a property manager orders our system, they own the data from their own network. In that case it may be better for us to invest in the network ourselves so we can offer the data to more than one customer,” says Staffan Liljestrand.
He is clear, however, that the data made available to more parties only concerns areas that are already public. Each customer keeps the data from their own premises themselves.