Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada.
Courtesy: Verkada
Security technology startup Verkada has reached a $5.8 billion valuation after a new funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, announced Wednesday.
“I think Google saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI and everything we’re driving to apply AI to the physical security industry,” CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa.
The company said in a release that the investment will be used to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities and provide liquidity.
The financing totaled $100 million, a person familiar with the terms of the round told CNBC, raising the company’s valuation by $1.3 billion from its Series E funding in February. The person asked not to be named in order to discuss details of the funding.
CapitalG also recently contributed to a $435 million fundraise for cybersecurity startup Armis in November.
The new funding comes as Verkada surpasses $1 billion in annualized bookings across 30,000 customers globally.
The company develops physical security products, including cameras, alarms and sensors, that are connected under a single cloud-based software platform.
Kaliszan said his company serves a broad span of businesses, such as retailers, government properties, schools, and transportation.
For example, TeraWatt Infrastructure, which supplies charging sites to electric vehicles like Google’s Waymo, uses Verkada technology to protect EV facilities.
In September, the company rolled out over 60 new AI features and platform updates, including tools like “AI-Powered Unified Timeline.”
The tool can automatically synthesize videos and images from several cameras into a single visual timeline, rather than requiring security teams to dig through multiple videos during an investigation.
“The genius of Filip and the team of Verkada is that they’re leveraging AI as a Rosetta Stone to really help unlock insights from cameras to help companies become safer and more efficient,” CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto told Bosa.
By capturing over 20 million images per hour, Verkada can provide notable data like foot traffic, occupancy rates, security violations and other trends, Zanutto said.
He added that the physical security is a sleeping $60 billion market that is led by legacy hardware like “cameras that just record, not cameras that think” — a gap that Verkada is hoping to fill.
However, AI-powered technology will not necessarily replace human security guards any time soon.
“I think humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think,” Kaliszan said. “But AI can empower these first responders to be more aware, to have situational knowledge, to know what to do, and in some cases, actually prevent the problems from happening.”
He pointed to the Louvre heist in October, where multiple crown jewels were robbed from the museum, as an opportunity where AI-assisted devices that could actively monitor, then immediately alert security forces, would be more effective than only physical personnel.
“If you could intervene right then, if you could know in real time that that’s happening, the potential for savings and preventing damage is tremendous,” he said.
