Japanese Sports Giant Asics (Arthur) Invested In UK Start-Ups

Recently, Aura Vision, a British start-up company, announced that it had completed $1 million 100 thousand in seed wheel financing, mainly from angel investors, angel funds and enterprise risk funds.

Japanese sports giant Asics (Arthur) joined the Vc firm through its ASICS Ventures Corporation.

Aura Vision, headquartered in London, UK, was established in 2017 to create a store traffic analysis system for physical retailers. It detects and tracks passenger traffic through existing surveillance cameras.

The technology only involves other demographic variables such as age, gender and so on. It does not need to recognize faces. Therefore, it strictly adheres to the EU General Data Protection Ordinance and protects the identity privacy of customers.

Through this technology, physical retailers can understand which areas of customers shop in the most time and which products are most popular, thereby improving the entity operation.

Online retailers have the advantage of the Internet. They can get a lot of consumption data through the Internet, but traditional retailers are hard to get enough data.

In the UK, many large supermarket chains can only analyze and track consumer shopping habits through the membership shopping card, and spend nearly 500 million pounds a year.

Aura Vision technology can effectively help physical retailers solve this dilemma.

According to rough estimates, there are at least 245 million professional surveillance cameras installed in the world, with rich video data resources, but only 1% of them are used.

Aura Vision makes full use of this data resource, obtains accurate real-time information through low-cost cameras and existing security systems, and associates customer demographic data with their shopping footprints in stores, and finally relates them to the goods purchased on the cash register, thus obtaining more comprehensive data than the member shopping scorecards.

At the same time, compared with wireless network and Bluetooth tracking, Aura Vision technology has higher accuracy and more details.

In 2016, Asics set up Vc firm ASICS Ventures Corporation, aiming at supporting start-ups and developing new technologies, thus providing technical support and inspiration for Asics.

Previously, ASICS Ventures Corporation has invested in three start-ups, and in March this year jointly organized a new accelerator project ASICS Accelerator Program for the start-up company with its parent company.

After gaining part of Aura Vision, Asics will launch a Aura Vision store traffic analysis system in its own brand retail store to enhance store operation.