Agustín Hernández Bonaglia is the co-founder and chief executive of Xmartlabs, the Montevideo, Uruguay, product development studio, and the co-founder of Lanthorn.ai, which uses AI to count and track people in video from ordinary security cameras (Uruguay XXI; Hacer Empresa).
Building Xmartlabs in Montevideo
Xmartlabs was founded in Montevideo in 2012, and he leads it from its office on Bulevar España (Uruguay XXI). Under him the studio has worked with more than 50 startups and established companies, released open source iOS libraries used in more than 40,000 apps, and turned toward AI products for healthcare (Uruguay XXI; Xmartlabs).
Lanthorn.ai and video analytics
At Lanthorn.ai he applied computer vision to video from IP cameras to measure crowd density and foot traffic, processing the data on low-cost local hardware with open source software to protect privacy (Hacer Empresa). The product grew out of the pandemic, when buildings needed to track occupancy, and later found uses such as planning how much food to prepare and adjusting air conditioning to how many people were present (Hacer Empresa). “AI can improve over time with more training data, and the solution can be extended with new metrics and reports,” he told Hacer Empresa in 2023 (Hacer Empresa, translated from Spanish).