Agilence raises another $2 million

CAMDEN, N.J.—Agilence, a provider of point of sale video auditing solutions, generally working in the loss-prevention space, announced today a $2 million round of venture capital funding from Granite Ventures, Schneider Electric Ventures, and NextStage Capital. It is a further addition to the series B round announced in the fall of 2008. This summer, Schneider was brought into the series B with a $500,000 investment, and this three-investor addition brings the second round to a total of $6.5 million.

CEO Russell Hawkins said, “looking at some of the challenges we have on the product development side, driven by features requests and strategic relationships [with the likes of IBM and Pelco] that were developed, it become clear that a little more capital would make sense.”

“We're a great match for the IBM POS systems,” Hawkins said, “and since they're the market leader in POS systems, we're actually presenting our solution through the IBM team, and it's gotten a lot of attention.” For example, he said, one regional grocer was able to realize $20 million in shrink reduction year-over-year, with less than a $2 million technology investment.

“It's such a strong return on investment,” Hawkins said, “such a bottom line impact, that it can justify a lot of new POS systems.”

Further, he said, because of Schneider's involvement, Pelco and Agilence are “creating solutions that combine their hardware with our software,” Hawkins said, and Agilence is getting access to Pelco's customer base and working with Pelco on “a number of products that go beyond our primary focus on retail.”

Hawkins said the company is in the middle of a proof-of-concept installation with a quick-serve restaurant chain, for example, and is working with a large banking institution.

While he said it's been a tough year to be in retail, Hawkins said, “we made a tremendous amount of progress in the past year. You always want to be generating more revenue, but we have more than doubled our account base year over year, and had a significant win with a major grocery chain that I can't disclose and that was in partnership with IBM ... our relationship with IBM is accelerating.”