Butlr was founded in 2019 by San Francisco-based engineers Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng in 2019 as a spinoff of
MIT Media Lab. Deng and Zeng were named to 2020
Forbes 30 Under 30 List in the Manufacturing & Industry category for their work with Butlr. In 2021, Butlr raised $7.9 million in seed funding led by Hyperplane, with participation from
Founder Collective and
SOSV. The funding supported expansion of its spatial sensing technology into new applications, including senior care and workplace analytics. In 2025, Butlr expanded its AI platform and launched new sensor variants to support workplace, healthcare, and education applications. The company also formed a strategic partnership with Ricoh’s RICOH Innovation Fund to integrate its occupancy analytics into global workplace solutions.
Products and partnerships In 2022, Butlr announced two partnerships, the first with real estate technology company Propstack to provide occupancy sensing technology for commercial real estate projects in India. The second was Butlr a marketing partnership with GP Pro, a division of Georgia-Pacific. Butlr also collaborated with
Carrier Global Corporation to embed its technology into Carrier's cloud-based digital platform Abound. Butlr was named one of the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers of 2022. In 2023, Butlr announced the Heatic 2, the latest edition of its mountable wireless sensor. The
World Economic Forum was selected Butlr for its Yes San Francisco program, which was created to revitalize the city's business district. Butlr also won the
Sustainability Award at the 2024 Core 77 Design Awards. == References ==