Building the Invisible Security Layer
Walk into a warehouse in Sacramento, a school bus depot in Oakland, or a distribution center in Phoenix - there's a reasonable chance the cameras watching the door are connected to Monarch. Not that you'd know it. Chase Gonzales built his company to stay out of the headlines and in the infrastructure.
Monarch Connected operates out of 1819 Polk St in San Francisco, a neighborhood that leans more artisan coffee than venture capital. The company provides AI-powered cloud security cameras, fleet dash cameras, GPS tracking, ELD compliance tools, environmental sensors, and access control - a full stack of intelligent physical security delivered without a server, without an NVR, without the hardware headache that used to make enterprise security a six-figure IT project.
Physical security should work like modern software: plug in, connect to the cloud, get smarter over time with automatic updates. Monarch built that world for enterprises, fleets, and government clients who stopped believing in server rooms.
From Open Houses to Cloud Deals
Before Gonzales was pitching AI cameras to fleet operators, he was walking buyers through living rooms. Five years in residential real estate at Better Homes and Gardens will teach you one thing above all else: the close matters, but the relationship is what you're actually selling.
That lesson followed him when he pivoted into tech in 2013. He joined Anchor - a cloud backup startup - first as a sales development rep, then as an account executive. Anchor was acquired by eFolder, which then merged with Axcient. Gonzales stayed through the transitions. At Axcient, he managed the Mountain and West Coast territories and did something that still stands in the company record books: closed the single largest deal in Axcient's history, then followed it up by exceeding his monthly quota by 108% - the best single month any salesperson had ever posted there.
The best salespeople eventually ask themselves the same question: why am I building someone else's empire?
Three years at Axcient gave Gonzales something more valuable than commission checks. It gave him a map - how cloud technology is bought, who buys it, what the objections sound like, and where the real pain lives. He watched the security camera market from the sidelines and saw the same inefficiency everywhere: clunky hardware, proprietary software, local storage that flooded and failed, and zero intelligence baked into the video feed.
The 2017 Bet
Gonzales founded Monarch in January 2017. For the first 16 months, he also ran sales - VP of Sales in title, full revenue engine in practice. He wasn't hiring someone to sell a company he hadn't proven yet. By May 2018, the company had enough momentum that he could fully inhabit the CEO role. He hasn't looked back.
What Monarch Actually Does
The Monarch pitch is deceptively simple: replace your entire legacy security infrastructure with cloud-native hardware that thinks. No DVR. No NVR. No local server. Every camera connects directly to the cloud, stores unlimited footage, and runs AI continuously on every frame.
License plate recognition. Smart object and person detection. Environmental sensors tracking air quality, temperature, and occupancy. NFC ID readers. Real-time dash cameras for fleet vehicles. GPS tracking with routing and driver analytics. ELD compliance tools for trucks that need to comply with federal Hours of Service regulations. It's a sprawling product surface that has one organizing principle: the physical world should be as legible as data.
The Partner Play
Gonzales built Monarch as a channel partner, not a manufacturer. Monarch sits at the top of Verkada's 3,000+ channel partner roster - a network of resellers that spans the country. It also runs as a top-tier partner for Samsara, the fleet intelligence company.
The strategic logic is tight. Verkada and Samsara build the hardware and core software. Monarch brings the enterprise relationships, the vertical expertise, the integration work, and the managed service layer. Customers get a single throat to grab for everything - installation, training, ongoing support, software updates. The channel-partner model, done well, is a moat built from relationships rather than patents.
Monarch Technology Ecosystem
Customers You Don't Hear About
Monarch's customer list stays quiet, the way enterprise infrastructure vendors usually do. But the breadth of their product stack tells you something about who they serve: school bus operators who need route optimization and driver safety data; construction sites that need environmental monitoring alongside camera coverage; warehouses that need asset tracking from dock to delivery; government facilities that need cloud security without the on-premise server burden.
The company's insurance angle is worth noting too. Fleet operators who deploy AI dash cameras with real-time incident detection can demonstrate safer driving behavior to insurers - reducing premiums in ways that make the technology essentially pay for itself. Gonzales knows how to make the numbers work for a skeptical buyer. That's what five years of enterprise sales at Axcient teaches.
The Education Arc
Gonzales studied at Sierra College, picking up an associate's degree, and later added online coursework at the University of Michigan. Neither credential is the kind of pedigree that San Francisco's venture class tends to celebrate. What they represent instead is a pattern of self-directed learning - the habit of building skills to match ambition, not waiting for an institution to confer credibility.
It fits. The career arc from real estate agent to record-breaking cloud sales rep to founder is not a linear trajectory that any MBA program designs. It's the kind of path you make by iterating on what you know, then betting on the next version of yourself.
The physical security market is enormous, fragmented, and overdue for a cloud-native reboot. Monarch is not trying to win on hardware specs. It wins on simplicity, service, and the willingness to manage the messy middle of enterprise deployment that product companies prefer to ignore.
Career by the Numbers
What Comes Next
Monarch's trajectory points toward one destination: becoming the dominant managed cloud security provider for the sectors that move physical goods and secure physical spaces. Fleets are already in the portfolio. Enterprises are already buying. Government contracts are already live.
The AI layer is where the real growth story sits. Every camera Monarch deploys is a data node. Every dash cam is a rolling sensor. Every environmental monitor is a signal in a network that gets smarter as it scales. Gonzales is building infrastructure that compounds - the kind that gets harder to displace the longer it runs.
He's done it without a flashy funding round in the headlines, without a unicorn valuation, without the typical San Francisco startup theater. Just a founder who learned to sell in open houses, sharpened the skill in cloud boardrooms, and then decided to build the company rather than keep working for one.