He went from selling pencils to schools to keeping guns out of them. The detour ran through a Cincinnati rooftop, Harvard, and a fraud-hunting algorithm.
Michael Green runs a company that spends every day looking for the one bad thing in a river of ordinary people. At Athena Security, the Austin startup he co-founded and now leads as CEO, that bad thing is a concealed weapon. The system uses cameras, sensors, and artificial intelligence to spot a gun before it crosses a threshold - the door of a school, a hospital lobby, a casino floor, a warehouse entrance. Visitors walk through at a natural pace. The software does the worrying.
That is the job now. Roughly 110 people, $18.6 million in funding, and a product line that has grown from a single idea into ID-based visitor management, a Concealed Weapons Detection System, real-time photo alerts, and - because this is 2026 - an AI "telepresence officer" that can greet visitors as a hologram and translate languages on the spot. Green's pitch is not about flash. It is about proof.
"Security officers are some of the most skeptical people on the planet," he has said. They don't believe what they hear over the phone, and even online demos feel too abstract. So Athena brings the machine to the field and turns it on in front of them. In an industry where the buyer has heard every promise, the only currency that spends is a live test that works.
In 2010 Green bought a four-bedroom house on Mulberry Street, a perch overlooking Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine. A week after the purchase, he was up on the rooftop deck with a cable installer when gunfire cracked below. "We both hit the deck," he recalls. Nobody plans a career around a reflex. But the violence in the neighborhood kept coming, and the instinct that flattened him against the deck never really stood back up.
He puts it plainly: "It's kind of deep within me to be a protector." Years later, when the chance came to build technology that keeps weapons out of public space, the line between the personal and the professional had already been erased.
It's kind of deep within me to be a protector.
Green is an Anderson Township native, a St. Xavier High School graduate, and a Harvard man who played football for the Crimson before earning a degree in economics in 2001. His grandfather founded the John R. Green Company, a Covington, Kentucky distributor of school supplies and furniture. Michael joined that business in 2006 and, in 2016, led its sale.
There's a tidy irony in the arc. He grew up around a company that outfitted classrooms with desks and crayons. Now he sells schools a very different category of equipment - the kind that watches the door. The customer never changed. The product did.
The grandson of a school-supply founder now spends his days trying to make sure the worst day never reaches a classroom. Same buildings, opposite catalog.
After the 2016 sale, Green moved to San Francisco and spent about three years building Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer compliance software - the unglamorous machinery that hunts dirty money inside oceans of legitimate transactions. It sounds like a hard left turn from physical security. He sees it as the same problem wearing a different coat.
Both jobs, he argues, are about finding needles in haystacks while keeping the experience frictionless for everyone who belongs there. Catch the launderer without freezing the honest customer's account. Catch the gun without making a hospital feel like an airport. The discipline transferred cleanly. Only the stakes at the door changed.
AI plus sensors spot concealed weapons while visitors keep walking at a natural pace - no pat-downs, no bottleneck.
Hospitals, schools, casinos, warehouses, and retail - anywhere people gather and a weapon shouldn't get past the front door.
An AI "telepresence officer" can greet visitors as a hologram and translate languages on the spot.
Graduates Harvard with a degree in economics, after playing football for the Crimson.
Joins the family business, the John R. Green Company in Covington, Kentucky.
Buys the Mulberry Street house. A week later, the rooftop, the cable installer, the gunfire.
Leads the sale of the school-supply business and heads west to San Francisco.
Builds AML / KYC compliance software - finding needles in financial haystacks.
Joins Athena Security as President and co-founder, alongside Lisa Falzone and Chris Ciabarra.
Takes on CEO responsibilities at Athena.
Athena raises $10M, lifting total funding to $18.6M.
Athena runs on a three-founder structure that prizes daily communication and alignment - three people who talk every day rather than drift into three companies. Green's own advice to founders leans toward humility: expect the challenges that demand personal growth, and don't mistake a roadmap for a guarantee.
He has described himself as an executive who solves problems that are valuable to customers, and he prefers innovative end-users to safe ones. Under his watch, Athena launched healthcare violence reporting software and pushed multi-sensor walk-through detection deeper into everyday commercial settings. The throughline is steady: pick a problem people actually feel, then prove the fix in the room.
Security officers are some of the most skeptical people on the planet.
Green doesn't just talk about field demos - he runs them. In one, the CEO walks a school through the Weapons Detection System himself, testing the gear in the exact place it's meant to work.