Sam Joseph and the Trouble with Watching Nothing

Nothing happening can be surprisingly demanding work. A security operator has to watch for the moment a familiar doorway becomes an unfamiliar problem, while the camera keeps supplying pictures of a doorway. Sam Joseph found a business opportunity in that mismatch. Buildings had bought the equipment to see. People still had to supply the attention, one uneventful minute after another.

Before Hakimo, Joseph was an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford. He and his eventual co-founder, Sagar Honnungar, noticed three developments arriving together: better cameras, cheaper cameras, and improving AI algorithms. Security seemed a useful place to put them together. Then they visited security operations centers and talked to the people responsible for making the whole arrangement work.

Those conversations mattered. A technical possibility became a problem with actual customers attached. Joseph described the decision that followed in plain terms: he would “pause my research at Stanford and start Hakimo.” The pause is a useful detail in his story. He had already demonstrated that he could do well inside an academic system. He was choosing to spend his time somewhere the examination questions arrived without warning.

A gold medal, followed by an open question

His engineering education began at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he studied electrical engineering from 2012 to 2016. He received the President of India Prize for the highest academic record among the graduating B.Tech. and Dual Degree students. His recorded grade point average was 9.96 out of 10. There was evidently very little room left at the top of that particular scale.

In September 2016, he began graduate study in electrical engineering at Stanford, with Sachin Katti as his adviser. He earned a master's degree and became a doctoral candidate. The work around that period included communications research, nanosatellite systems, and a demonstration of position tracking for virtual reality using ordinary Wi-Fi. Before the security cameras, there were already questions about what existing equipment could be made to tell us.

His time at Stanford also included teaching. At Stanford he served as a teaching assistant for Embedded Networked Systems in fall 2016, mentoring students and helping design assignments and examinations.

A medal is a tidy achievement. Starting a company produces a considerably less tidy set of obligations. With Honnungar as co-founder and chief technology officer, Joseph became responsible for turning an engineering proposition into something security teams would use. The founders established Hakimo in 2020. Their chosen setting was physical security, where an algorithm has to make sense of a door, a gate, or a parking lot.

The door held open for the wrong person

One of Joseph's recurring subjects is the ordinary courtesy of holding a door. In his writing about employee security, he points out that a gesture learned as good manners can become a way around an access control system. A valid badge admits one person. Somebody else follows. The building's electronic record and the building's actual population have parted company.

This is the kind of problem Hakimo was built to address. Camera footage and badge-reader data can be considered together. The software looks at the people passing through and the credentials presented, helping identify entry that the badge reader alone would miss. It is an application of computer vision with a remarkably unglamorous setting: the entrance everyone uses on the way to work.

Joseph's writing also pays attention to what happens after a system detects something. Patterns can reveal entrances where tailgating recurs, or employees who need reminders. Security teams can respond with warnings, signs, and changes in behavior. The technology is part of a working routine, alongside policy and the people expected to follow it. Good manners require a little situational editing.

False alarms present the opposite difficulty. Instead of an event going unnoticed, something harmless demands attention. Joseph has described AI clearing repetitive alerts so human operators can concentrate on incidents that need a response. Hakimo reported reductions of more than 80 percent at customer sites in its early public account. That was a company-reported result, tied to those deployments, rather than a promise about every door in the world.

An award for a less noisy room

In March 2022, Hakimo Alarm Monitoring 2.0 won the Commercial Monitoring Solutions category at the Security Industry Association's New Products and Solutions Awards. It also received the Judges' Choice Award. Joseph and sales director Jason Wright accepted the award at ISC West in Las Vegas. For a company selling tools to monitoring teams, recognition in that setting put its work in front of the people who understood the job.

The problem had not changed merely because the company had a trophy. Monitoring still involved a mixture of electronic events, video, hardware, and people. An alert becomes useful when someone can establish what happened and decide what to do. The founders' proposition was to automate some of the repeated checking that sits between those two steps.

By April 2023, Hakimo announced another $6 million in funding, led by Rocketship.vc. Its investors included returning backers and newcomers such as Carrier Ventures and physical security entrepreneur John L. Moss. The company described a platform that could also issue warnings through speakers when unwanted activity was detected. Watching was beginning to include a response.

Joseph's role now involved more than explaining computer vision. He had to connect the software to operating budgets, existing systems, and the work of security professionals. The 2023 announcement also reported an operational test and evaluation by the National Safe Skies Alliance. The setting gives his career a particular texture: academic training meeting an industry that tests equipment against practical requirements.

Two storage sites become nine

Curio Storage offers a smaller, more tangible view of the business. Former tenants were getting back onto its properties, jumping or cutting through fences to reach their old units. Cameras recorded incidents, but the recordings did little for staff who found out after the fact. Putting guards at every location around the clock was too expensive for the operator's model.

Curio tried Hakimo at two facilities. In the company's account of the deployment, the relationship expanded to nine. Operations manager Maria Erazo described a change in how the team learned about problems: live alerts could flag suspicious activity and gate malfunctions while there was still something useful to do. Security reached into ordinary customer service, including the unromantic business of a gate that would not behave.

The scale of that example makes it readable. Two sites to nine is an expansion a property manager can picture. It also brings Joseph's work back to the founders' initial visits. A product has to fit the circumstances of its buyer, whether that buyer runs a corporate monitoring center or looks after tenants' belongings. The interesting question is what changes during an actual shift.

A construction site is a very long room

By May 2025, Hakimo was being used on Skanska's I-405 construction project around Bothell and Woodinville in Washington. The construction zone stretched seven miles. Project superintendent Scott Turner described missing trucks and tools stolen from storage containers. A single guard moving through a site that size faced an obvious geography problem.

Joseph explained the system with an analogy: “Cameras are like eyes, and then AI is like a brain for those eyes.” Detection could prompt a recorded warning or an alert. A real human operator could then contact somebody on site or, for a serious incident, law enforcement. The project was using 15 cameras at the time of that account.

Turner said the cameras appeared to be a deterrent, while also explaining that there had been nobody to catch. That distinction keeps the example grounded. A quiet site can be encouraging without furnishing an experiment that proves every cause. Joseph's system was operating in a real construction environment, with the messiness that comes with it.

Finding the moment after the moment

Joseph has also been working on the other end of a security event: the search through footage afterward. In January 2026, Hakimo launched Forensic Search, allowing users to type descriptions in natural language and retrieve relevant video. Queries could describe a person in a red shirt or somebody opening a car door, with filters for camera, location, and time.

“Security teams shouldn’t have to waste hours searching through video,” he said. The aim is recognizable to anyone who has dragged a playback slider back and forth, hoping the next frame contains the answer. Recording an event leaves the additional task of finding it. Hakimo's search feature extends Joseph's original concern with attention into the archive.

His career has brought him repeatedly to this boundary between information and useful action. Badge events, live footage, recorded footage: each supplies material that somebody needs to interpret. In his writing on critical infrastructure, he returns to the time spent on manual monitoring and the need to give security professionals more room for consequential work.

The next assignment is already on the wall

In July 2026, Joseph announced a $12 million growth round led by Zigg Capital. He put Hakimo's total funding at $32 million. The announcement reported more than 300 customers, revenue tripling year over year, and a team that had doubled. Those figures describe the company's reported position at that date; customers and protected properties are different counts.

His plans included expansion into additional markets and geographies, continued improvements in detection and response, and applications beyond security, such as compliance and customer experience. The common starting point remains the cameras a building already owns. It is a practical place to begin another assignment: equipment installed, information arriving, and somebody who needs help making sense of it.

There is a pleasingly modest physical object at the center of Joseph's story. The camera remains on the wall. The door remains a door. What he has spent the years changing is the work that follows a picture or an alert. An academic prize measured how well he answered questions. Hakimo gives him a continuing supply of new ones.