Coram AI Secures $13.8 Million in Series A Funding
Coram AI, a pioneering company in AI-native video security, has secured $13.8 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Battery Ventures, a global technology-focused investment firm, with participation from existing investors 8VC and Mosaic Ventures. This significant funding will enable Coram AI to expand its product lines and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Founded in 2022 by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondruska, both former executives in Lyft’s autonomous driving division, Coram AI offers a novel security platform that leverages advanced vision and language models for real-time video analysis from security cameras. The platform is designed to work with any IP camera in existing installations, minimizing infrastructure overhead for customers. This innovative approach allows for searches described in natural language and advanced applications such as virtual security guards capable of interpreting complex activities over long timespans.
Coram AI serves a variety of sectors, including K-12 education, manufacturing, and logistics, by automatically analyzing camera footage in real-time to detect threats, surface safety issues, and provide operational insights that reduce waste. For instance, the platform can transmit immediate alerts if a potential threat, such as someone brandishing a gun, is detected on school premises. Similarly, users at manufacturing plants can quickly sift through thousands of hours of footage to isolate recorded slip-and-fall incidents, helping to train managers to prevent such accidents in the future.
The software also has the capability to detect license plates, recognize faces, and issue alerts if a known offender is identified on-site. This addresses a major problem for businesses: despite the presence of over 80 million security cameras in the U.S. and more than 500 million worldwide, excluding China, most video recordings remain unseen on hard drives, leaving valuable insights untapped.
As part of the financing, Battery Partner Marcus Ryu joins Coram’s board. Ryu brings extensive experience, having been the co-founder and CEO of Guidewire Software. Coram’s founders, Jain and Ondruska, combine deep academic expertise in video processing and machine learning with technical pragmatism developed in the demanding domain of self-driving vehicles. This combination makes them an ideal founding team to build winning consumer and enterprise video AI products for the vast security and safety markets.
Coram AI’s customers include the Middletown Unified School District in California and PCC Community Markets in Washington. The company’s vision is to transform security cameras into more than just video recorders; they aim to make them a constant pair of eyes that keep the public safe and secure in a privacy-sensitive manner. With the new generation of AI, human-level understanding of video is finally possible, and Coram AI is at the forefront of bringing these breakthroughs to public safety.
The funding will be used to build more product lines and grow the company’s go-to-market and engineering teams. Coram AI plans to focus on various product launches, including AI gun-detection software with instant alerts, and shoring up its hardware offerings to address diverse needs for different types of companies and teams. This technology is crucial for enhancing safety and efficiency in various sectors, and Coram AI is poised to lead the way in AI-native video security.
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