The Two Engineers Who Turned Locked Doors Into a Software Problem

Every weekday morning, on a lot of college campuses, someone used to sit down with a spreadsheet and a scheduling report and decide which doors should open. Chemistry lecture in Room 214 at 9. Debate club in the same room at 7 that night. A guest speaker in the auditorium on Thursday, but only from 5:30 to 9. Each of those decisions had to be translated, by hand, into a card-reader schedule. Miss one and a professor stands locked out in front of forty students. Detrios was built to delete that spreadsheet.

The company, based just outside Rochester, New York, does something that sounds narrow and turns out to be everywhere: it writes software that sits between the systems that know who should be in a building - class schedules, event calendars, housing assignments - and the systems that physically control the doors. It does not make locks. It does not make key cards. It makes the middle, the part that translates "a class is scheduled here at 9" into "unlock this reader at 8:45 and secure it at 10:05." That middle is called an integration, and Detrios has spent nearly a decade becoming very good at it.

01 / THE PROBLEMThe boring job nobody wanted to do

Before a product existed, campuses had two options, and both were bad. Option one: schedule every unlock by hand, chasing a moving calendar of classes, events and room reservations across hundreds of doors. Option two: give up on precision and just leave buildings unlocked during standard hours - say 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. - which is convenient and also the opposite of security. Neither scaled. Both quietly cost real staff hours and real risk.

This is the kind of problem that rarely makes a pitch deck. It is unglamorous, invisible until it breaks, and universally hated by the people stuck doing it. Which is exactly why it was a good business. The demand was already there; nobody had packaged the fix.

02 / THE FOUNDERSFrom the manufacturer's side of the glass

Justin Dagen and Jason Higley did not stumble into access control. They spent roughly 15 years at Lenel, one of the biggest names in the field, as customer-facing software engineers - the people who build integrations for higher education, K-12, government, the military and large enterprises. Between them they touched access systems for more than 90 Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. They spent those years watching the same gap from the inside: customers who had bought excellent hardware and still could not get it to talk cleanly to the calendar, the housing system, the HR feed.

In 2016 they left to build the thing they kept being asked for. The name Detrios is a small joke that made it into the logo - a play on the word "tree," with its branching structure baked into the brand. It fits a company whose whole job is connecting one system to many others.

03 / THE PRODUCTWhat DAX actually does

The flagship is DAX, an off-the-shelf product aimed squarely at higher education. Its job is deceptively simple: read a university's existing scheduling and housing data, and turn it into door commands in real time. A class ends, the room secures itself. An event is booked from 6 to 9, and DAX opens the door at 5:45 and locks it again afterward. A student's semester housing assignment becomes a dynamic map of which exterior doors, common areas and rooms their card should open.

The proof point came early. Detrios ran its first DAX pilot in 2017 with the Deacon OneCard team at Wake Forest University - 60 rooms, paired with ASSA ABLOY Aperio wireless locks. The university's leadership wanted to squeeze more use out of three million square feet of campus space by letting students and faculty reserve rooms freely. The bottleneck was the manual unlock scheduling. In that pilot, DAX saved the university about 15 hours per day of work that had been done by hand.

04 / THE PLAYBOOKCustom first, product second

The interesting part of the Detrios story is the order it did things in. It did not start with a product and hunt for buyers. It started by building bespoke integrations - one campus at a time, one weird requirement at a time - and got paid to learn what every school actually needed. Only after building roughly 50 custom integrations did the common shape become obvious enough to package. DAX was not a guess. It was the pattern extracted from work they had already been paid to do.

That is why the split in its customer base is telling. Of the 90-plus institutions Detrios supports, roughly 50 run on custom integrations and about 40 on the DAX product. The custom work funds and informs the product; the product scales what the custom work taught them.

05 / THE CUSTOMERSWho is actually buying

The customer list reads like a cross-section of American higher education, from 4,000-student regional colleges to universities north of 50,000. Wake Forest was first. Auburn University uses DAX alongside a Detrios cardholder import feed to automate a student's access from start to finish. The University of Kentucky runs it with EMS and Lenel OnGuard to open buildings. Union College has leaned on it to manage card-access areas for years.

The scale is the quiet flex: an 11-person company whose software processes more than two million events a year and governs door access for over a million students. Nobody on those campuses thinks about Detrios, which is the point. Access control is a product you only notice when it is wrong.

06 / THE MOATKnowing the APIs nobody wants to learn

Detrios's advantage is not a flashy algorithm. It is depth in a set of systems most engineers never touch. The team carries 10 to 20-plus years each in access control, and it knows the manufacturer best practices, quirks and APIs of the major platforms firsthand - because several of them helped build those integrations from the vendor side. When you support Lenel, Genetec, CCURE, S2 and Feenics on one end, and 25Live, EMS, Mazevo, StarRez and Adirondack on the other, the knowledge itself is the product. It is unglamorous, hard to copy, and exactly the kind of moat that lasts.

The team frames this as a philosophy: what it sells are "long-term supported integrations," not one-off implementations that break the next time a vendor pushes an update. In a market full of installers who wire something up and move on, ongoing support is the differentiator.

07 / THE EXITWhy SwiftConnect bought it

In late 2022, SwiftConnect acquired Detrios. The logic is clean once you see it. SwiftConnect built mobile-credential technology - the phone in your pocket becoming your access badge. What it lacked was the reason a door should open in the first place: the schedules, events and assignments that Detrios already read fluently. One company had the credential; the other had the context. Together they can address connected access across commercial real estate, enterprise and, crucially, higher education, where DAX gave SwiftConnect an immediate foothold.

The acquisition was part of a broader consolidation. SwiftConnect went on to acquire other players in the space, a sign that the integration and enablement layer - not the hardware - is the part of physical security everyone now wants to own. DAX 4.0 has continued to ship under that umbrella, adding support for Genetec, Feenics and Mazevo, with more access platforms on the roadmap.

08 / THE FITWhere it sits in the market - and where it wouldn't

Detrios occupies a specific slot: the middleware between building schedules and physical access, sold mostly to universities. Its competition is not really another product - it is the status quo of doing this by hand, or a campus IT team building a brittle one-off script. DAX's pitch is that it is the only off-the-shelf solution purpose-built for this exact link in higher education.

It is worth being honest about the boundaries. This is not a mass-market tool; it works because higher education has a dense, recurring scheduling problem across thousands of doors and shared spaces. A single-building office with static hours would not need it. The value also depends on a campus already running compatible scheduling and access systems - the integration is only as good as the platforms on both ends. Detrios is a specialist, and that focus is the reason it works.

The through-line of the whole story is unfashionable and durable: pick a problem everyone has and nobody wants to solve, learn the systems no one else will learn, build the custom version until the product reveals itself, then let a bigger platform carry it further. Detrios did that with locked doors. The doors still open on time. Almost nobody knows why.