HiveWatch is a Los Angeles-based start-up company that uses multi-sensor fusion technology to help the company better respond to physical security threats. It has received US$20 million in Series A financing led by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.
Former Twitter executives — Costolo as CEO and COO and Bain as COO — said HiveWatch resonated with them because they experienced the pain of expanding their physical security program.
"When running a company, nothing is more important than your employees. It is imperative to prioritize their safety and security," said Bain, who and Costolo are now managing partners of venture capital and consulting firm 01A . "You spare no effort to do this, but the reality is that the software and hardware products that serve the corporate physical security market are seriously inadequate. They are outdated, disconnected from each other, and make the response to incidents incredibly slow. When we see Ryan use When HiveWatch built something, we immediately saw the value and future of smart physical security."
HiveWatch claims that its smart security approach can help organizations modernize physical security. Using sensor fusion (collecting data from multiple sensors) and machine learning, the startup's platform extracts data from the company's different monitoring systems and security sensors to provide operators with information to evaluate and respond to alerts. The startup claims that this can help organizations transform corporate security operations from reactive responses to proactive plans designed to identify threats before they occur.
"Existing companies trying to solve physical security issues are usually divided into two camps: either technology-driven or security-driven," HiveWatch CEO and founder Ryan Schonfeld (Ryan Schonfeld) told TechCrunch. "Technically inspired companies have leadership that is fully focused on technological progress at all costs, and then inspired security practitioners, who are far from cutting-edge technologies or the talent required to implement solutions.
"HiveWatch's approach is to close the gap. We have brought together incredible technology and security practitioners to not only build new technical capabilities for security programs, but also collect meaningful data from their sensors and their operational processes in order to Security leaders can continuously improve their existing installation systems. Failures in program design should not be discovered after bad things happen. That's too late."
The startup’s Series A investment was completed less than a year after the startup received US$5 million in seed funding, in addition to Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, and Penny Jar Capital, as well as early HiveWatch investors Crosscut Ventures, Freestyle Participation of Capital and SaaS Ventures.
Schonfeld, a former adviser to the US State Department, said that HiveWatch will use the newly raised funds to create a better and more cohesive customer experience, as well as a first-class engineering team focused on diversity and inclusion.
This startup has revamped its privacy-friendly sensors to help fight COVID-19