A radio signal does not care whether it is near a billboard or a guarded gate. It simply travels, fades, reflects, and leaves evidence. The business built around that evidence can change completely. Brent McKay has spent much of his career making such invisible traces useful, first in semiconductors and computer systems, later in advertising, and now in situational awareness. His story is less a sequence of dramatic reinventions than a long exercise in technical memory.
McKay is the founder and CEO of Bulzi, pronounced “bulls-eye,” a small company working with edge AI, IoT sensors, geolocation, and government customers. Its recent language is full of installations, first responders, compromised networks, and objects in an area of interest. Earlier versions of the company spoke about shoppers, outdoor displays, audience composition, and media plans. The vocabulary moved from Madison Avenue toward mission control. The underlying verbs barely changed: detect, locate, interpret.
That continuity is the interesting bit. Startups are usually narrated through the glamour of the pivot, as though a founder woke up, spun the wheel, and found a shinier market before breakfast. McKay’s arc suggests a quieter method. Keep the hard capability. Learn what it can do in the world. When the original market stops being the most urgent home for it, change the question.
An engineer learns to sell
McKay studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1980 to 1985. His professional trail then ran through AMD and Fujitsu, where public career records place him in regional and district sales roles. It is a useful pairing: the habits of an engineer, followed by the blunt education of asking customers to buy. One teaches what a system can do. The other reveals which parts anyone will pay to have done.
By the 1990s, he had co-founded Design Solutions. He went on to lead Interactive Media Network from 1998 to 2003 and Visual Appliances from 2003 to 2008. A patent issued in 2008, naming McKay among the inventors, addressed pixel burn-in on phosphor-based display panels. Even before Bulzi, the pattern was visible: electronics, displays, and the awkward border where machines meet human attention.
The titles moved around, but McKay repeatedly occupied the founder’s least tidy seat. He had to understand circuits, explain an unfamiliar product, recruit partners, and keep the commercial story close enough to the technology that neither floated away. His later work makes more sense when seen through this dual training. Bulzi is not merely a sensor company or a software company. It sells an argument about why signals in a physical place can support a better decision.
The billboard years
Bulzi Media emerged in 2008 with a stubborn advertising problem in view. Online media could count clicks and impressions. Outdoor advertising - screens in malls, airports, shops, transit stations, and public spaces - had a more physical reality and fuzzier measurement. A screen might be glowing, but who had actually been near it? How many people passed? What could an advertiser reasonably know without asking every passerby to participate?
McKay’s answer relied on the mobile phone as a proxy for presence. Bulzi developed zBeacon sensors and the LOCALiz data platform to detect devices and organize location information into audience measurements. His patents around media targeting and mobile-device signal monitoring show the engineering logic behind the pitch: combine observations across distance and time, infer useful audience patterns, and translate place into data.
In 2014, Bulzi announced that its audience-addressable digital out-of-home network was available through DOmedia. McKay described LOCALiz as real-time audience measurement meant to support more advanced targeting and activation. A year later, he appeared on the agenda for the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association’s Video Everywhere Summit. This was not laboratory technology waiting politely for a purpose. It was being carried into the machinery of media buying.
The durable machinery beneath the changing pitch
The ethical and technical tension was built in. Physical-world measurement needs to be useful without turning every human being into a named dossier. Bulzi’s public descriptions emphasized anonymous correlations and device presence rather than personal identity. The commercial wager was that a probabilistic picture of an audience could be valuable even when the people in it remained unknown.
Same signal, harder room
By 2020, the room had changed. Public SBIR records show Air Force Phase I and Phase II awards to Bulzi worth roughly $1.6 million that year. One project concerned RF and IoT sensors for base security; another focused on mobile-phone geospatial data for threat assessment. McKay framed the work as a repurposing of commercial technology for defense operations. It was a pivot, certainly, but also a transfer: audience sensing became area sensing, and a media platform became part of a security proposition.
The shift made the company’s accumulated knowledge newly relevant. A military installation is a far less forgiving environment than a shopping center. Networks can be congested or unavailable. Sensors need to be small, inexpensive, and power-aware. Useful information may come from several weak or partial signals rather than one pristine feed. Bulzi began describing an architecture that could analyze waveforms at the edge and share information across a mesh, reducing dependence on large centralized systems.
In January 2022, Bulzi announced the result of a demonstration at Fort Belvoir for the Army’s automated installation entry program. Six companies had been invited. According to McKay, Bulzi’s system detected occupants in moving vehicles with a 100 percent detection rate during the demonstration. The claim is narrow, tied to that event, and more telling for being so. Abstract talk about “smart installations” had met a gate, a moving vehicle, and a measurable test.
The Army selected Bulzi again in 2023 for work involving multimodal signals and machine learning. The proposed sensors were meant to identify, classify, and geolocate objects for needs including access control and emergency response. Multimodal is a functional word dressed in a slightly grand suit. It means no single sense is trusted to tell the whole story. The machine listens in several ways, then works out what deserves attention.
The advantage of a long memory
McKay’s career now spans semiconductors, display systems, outdoor media, mobile geolocation, and defense technology. Presented as industries, the list looks restless. Presented as capabilities, it is unusually consistent. Radio-frequency knowledge, computer architecture, data platforms, B2B selling, and physical-world measurement accumulate rather than disappear.
That compounding context may be the most transferable part of his story. A founder’s product is rarely identical to the thing first printed on the brochure. Beneath the market category sits a harder-won competence: detecting a kind of pattern, coordinating a kind of workflow, or solving a class of failure. The company that knows its competence can survive the expiration of its first description.
Bulzi’s later updates show the company trying to convert research programs into larger deployments. In 2024, it said Leidos had invited it to prepare a subcontractor proposal related to an Army installation-access contract. In June 2025, the Texas Army National Guard selected its SAFER system for an APFIT submission. That September, Bulzi reported that the National Guard Bureau had narrowed more than 200 submissions from 54 Guard organizations to four companies, including Bulzi, for the fiscal 2026 program. A selection is not a production contract, and a proposal is not revenue. The sequence still matters because government technology advances by gates, each one requiring evidence for the next.
Aiming without pretending
There is an appealing modesty in the name Bulzi. A bull’s-eye is precise, but it does not claim to know everything around the target. Sensing systems live by that distinction. Their job is to reduce uncertainty enough for a person to act, not to abolish uncertainty with a press release.
McKay’s public remarks are similarly practical. He talks about detection rates, repurposing technology, improving throughput, and giving operators situational awareness. Even his broadest ambition stays connected to people and places. The aspiration is not an all-seeing machine. It is a field of view that becomes more legible at the moment someone needs it.
For founders, the lesson is not to chase defense contracts or staple AI onto yesterday’s product. It is to inventory what the company has learned that its category name fails to capture. Bulzi was called an advertising-technology business because advertising was the first buyer. Yet its deeper asset was the ability to reason from faint signals about activity in a place. Once that was understood, the company could search for other places where the answer carried more weight.
McKay has spent four decades close to hardware while crossing several markets. The persistence is almost unfashionable. Silicon became systems. Systems met displays. Displays needed audiences. Audiences generated signals. Signals found a new job at the gate. The line is not perfectly straight, but neither is a radio wave. Both can still arrive.
Follow the signal