Building the
Unglamorous Future
In December 2025, Dean Drako merged two companies he owned - Eagle Eye Networks and Brivo - and handed himself the CEO title of the combined entity. The press called it a merger. Insiders called it inevitable. He'd been building toward it for a decade.
The combined Brivo now operates the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security platform. Access control. Video intelligence. Visitor management. Intrusion detection. One unified system, delivered from the cloud, to enterprises across multiple continents. The headquarters split across Bethesda and Austin. The offices scatter from Amsterdam to Tokyo to Bangalore. The ambition does not scatter at all.
Drako came up in Detroit and left for Ann Arbor to study electrical engineering. Before he graduated, he'd already sold his first company - T-net, a bulletin board system software business he'd built in high school. He used the proceeds to cover tuition. It was less a startup story than a problem-solving exercise: he needed money, he had a skill, he built a thing, he sold it. That logic has not changed.
After his BS at Michigan came a master's at UC Berkeley. After Berkeley came Design Acceleration Inc in 1992 - a semiconductor design company he built and sold to Cadence Design Systems in 1999. After Cadence came two startups at once: IC Manage (semiconductor design management, co-founded with Shiv Sikand) and Barracuda Networks, both in 2003.
"My goal was to acquire the physical security industry's best-in-class access control system. Brivo's true cloud architecture and open API approach put it a generation ahead of other access control systems."- Dean Drako, on acquiring Brivo for $50M in 2015
Barracuda became the career-defining chapter - chapter one, anyway. Drako and his co-founders built the IT security industry's first spam filter appliance in 2003. What started as a single product grew into 140+ products, 150,000 customers, $200M+ in annual revenue, and a NYSE IPO in November 2013 under the ticker CUDA. Ernst & Young named him Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007, Northern California, Networking and Communications. He stepped down as CEO in July 2012 to start the next thing.
The next thing was Eagle Eye Networks. The origin story is specific: Drako tried to set up a video surveillance system for a remote Barracuda office and found the experience so maddening - the hardware, the local servers, the IT overhead - that he decided to rebuild the category from the cloud. Eagle Eye officially launched in 2014. Goldman Sachs noticed, naming him one of its 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs that same year. Deloitte noticed four more times, putting Eagle Eye on its Technology Fast 500 in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023. The company raised $100M in a Series F in 2023.
In 2015 - the same year he acquired Brivo for $50M - Drako co-founded Drako Motors with Shiv Sikand. The automotive software platform company eventually produced the Drako GTE, a $1.2M all-electric quad-motor sports sedan that seats four and clocks 206 mph. Then came the Drako Dragon: a 2,000-horsepower, 200+ mph, 420-mile-range all-electric luxury SUV announced in November 2022. For a man who made his name on enterprise cybersecurity, the pivot to hypercars is either an anomaly or the most honest expression of his engineering instincts yet.
His patent portfolio - 53+ and counting - tells the same story in a different register. The domains covered read like a personal intellectual biography: video streaming, video storage, video analytics, digital image processing, network security and protocols, digital circuits, biochemical assays, and electric automobiles. Very few engineers in the world hold patents across all of those categories. Very few people have built operating companies in more than three of them.
"Now is a fantastic time to build solutions."- Dean Drako, on entrepreneurship and the technology opportunity landscape
The PermRecord Foundation, which Drako founded in 2015, is the quietest entry on his resume. Its mission: preserve digital legacies and provide perpetual access to digital materials for historical and educational purposes. A spam filter inventor building an archive for the future. He contains multitudes.
In 2024, he acquired Cobalt AI, an enterprise AI alarm filtering and security robotics company, folding it into the growing security constellation. That same year, EY handed him Entrepreneur of the Year again - Gulf South region, for Eagle Eye Networks. Seventeen years between the two awards. The second one is the rarer one: it means the first wasn't a fluke.
The merged Brivo enters 2026 with U.S. headquarters in Bethesda and Austin, international offices in Amsterdam, Bangalore, and Tokyo, and a platform designed to be an open ecosystem - supporting third-party video and access control solutions rather than walling off the market. Drako has described the value of open APIs as a generational advantage. He built Brivo's acquisition thesis on it. The merged entity is betting the platform on it.
He serves on the Engineering Leadership Advisory Board at the University of Michigan, an institution he returned to in 2016 to deliver the commencement address. He has also delivered keynotes at UC Berkeley Engineering Week and the Richard Newton lecture series. When he speaks at universities, he is closing a loop he opened in high school, when a kid in Detroit sold a bulletin board system so he could afford to go.