Sense360 Picks Up $2.75 Million Seed Led By FirstMark Capital

 is still in a quiet beta period, but the company has just picked up $2.75 million in seed funding from FirstMark Capital, with participation by Founder Collective, Qualcomm Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Double M Capital, Telenav, David Tisch, and more.
Sense360 is looking to leverage the power of smartphone sensors for developers.
Here’s the exact explanation from the website:

For the first time in human history we are all carrying around powerful computers jam packed with sensors. These sensors can understand where we are, what we are doing, and what is happening around us. Sense360 helps apps easily unlock this ambient and situational awareness to enable them to build more personalized and contextual mobile experiences.

The company was started by Eli Portnoy and Kamil Mroczek after selling their previous venture, Thinknear, to Telenav for $22.5 million three years ago.
I caught up with Eli over email this morning to see if he could shed some more light on what he envisions:

“How can you use the sensors on a phone to know if someone is at a gas station filling up their car, or driving and stuck at a light next to a gas station, or just walking near the gas station?,” he posited. “This requires location, accelerometer and gyroscope data, ambient light data, and a bunch of other sensor data. An app that wants to compare gas prices for users when they are in a gas station would have a really hard time collecting the data to build their model, finding the right insights, and then building the functionality in a privacy friendly and battery efficient way. Instead, they could come to us and our product would make it incredibly quick to automate this in their app.”
Right now, the services we use and love, from Instacart to Uber to Fitbit and back again, are undoubtedly useful and yet fragmented across our overall experience. But if those developers and users alike could harness the information from sensors (paired with information from the services themselves), they could present experiences at the exact right time and place.
And it doesn’t hurt that we add more and more sensors to our lives anyways, outside of the ones packed into our smartphone.

If you want to check out the Sense360 website, just click here.