Philips Lighting joins $7 million round for smart building sensor maker PointGrab

Israel's PointGrab has raised $7 million in funding for its sensors for smart buildings. The investors include lighting company Philips Lighting; Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co. (MUCAP), a venture capital arm of Japan's largest financial group; and existing investors ABB Technology Ventures (ATV) and others. Israel-based PointGrab makes CogniPoint, a smart-sensing solution that detects people in buildings and shuts off lighting if there's no one around who needs it. The goal is to enable effective building management and save money through energy efficiency. By embedding deep learning neural networks technology into cost-effective, miniature, and connected optical sensing devices, PointGrab's CogniPoint sensing solution provides analytics in the detection of occupants' locations, count, and movements.