Coram AI has raised $35m to turn the security cameras already bolted to walls into something closer to an autonomous detective.
The Series B is co-led by the new investor Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures, with UP Partners, 8VC and Mosaic Ventures joining. It takes the San Francisco company’s total funding to $66m.
Coram’s pitch is that physical security is stuck in the past. When something goes wrong, staff spend hours scrubbing through footage, access logs and alarms to piece together what happened.
Its answer is software it calls ‘Deep Investigation’, an AI agent you query in plain language. It searches months of video, entry records and visitor data across hundreds of cameras and sites, then hands back a report. Work that took hours, the company says, now takes minutes.
Founded four years ago by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondruska, Coram now runs at more than 1,500 locations, from schools to factories.
Privacy pitch, surveillance reality #
Coram leans hard on privacy. Its boxes run AI models on local NVIDIA chips at the edge, it says, so sensitive video never has to leave the building for the cloud. It also works with any existing IP camera, avoiding a costly rip-and-replace.
But the same platform sells facial recognition, licence-plate reading, ‘tailgating’ detection and live gun detection, and it is being pointed at schools, churches and workplaces.
One customer, a Dallas megachurch, watches over 30,000 worshippers across eight campuses. A high school swapped old cameras for real-time weapon detection. The efficiency is real; so is the reach.
That trade-off, safety bought with more monitoring, is not new to AI security. But autonomous agents sharpen it. A system that can investigate on its own, across every camera and door, is also a system that is always watching, and now draws its own conclusions.
The ‘operating system’ land grab #
Coram is part of a wave of startups trying to become the ‘operating system’ for a single industry by wrapping AI agents around it. Its bet is that every building will eventually run hundreds of agents in the background.
The money is chasing a real gap. ‘Physical security is one of the largest industries yet to be transformed by modern AI,’ said Allan Jean-Baptiste of Ansa Capital, and the incumbents largely sell cameras and dashboards, not autonomy, even as firms pour record sums into AI elsewhere.
For now, the headline numbers, ’10x more effective’, ‘hundreds of agents per space’, are Coram’s projections, not proof. But with $66m in the bank and 1,500 sites live, it has the runway to test whether the building of the future really does watch itself.
Get the TNW newsletter #
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.