access-control
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Khaled Alhaj Is Turning the Front Desk Into Software
From a hotel finance desk to Y Combinator, Khaled Alhaj has spent his twenties making the small frictions of communal living visible - then turning them into a product.
Patrick Barry Put Building Security in the Cloud. Now He Wants It to Think.
After helping build an early cloud security platform at Touchcom, Patrick Barry returned with BluBØX, a name born from moving boxes and a plan to make buildings less reactive. His latest bet is that AI should lower costs as well as add capability.
Justin Dagen Spent 15 Years Learning Why Doors Fail - Then He Made Them Read the Calendar
A pinball-playing software engineer found a stubborn campus problem hiding between two databases. The company he built to solve it now sits inside SwiftConnect, translating schedules into millions of quiet decisions at the door.
Harry Lerner Built the Machines That Make the Line Disappear
For two decades, Harry Lerner has obsessed over a moment most people barely notice: the instant a ticket becomes an open door. His playbook is built on useful details, patient adaptation and hardware designed to disappear into the job.
Grant Walter
Grant Walter is the Chairman, CEO and President of KoreLock, a Denver-based IoT technology company that sells turnkey embedded smart lock platforms to the lock and access-control industry. Rather than making locks or software, KoreLock builds the printed-circuit-board module, firmware and cloud that let any manufacturer ship a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected lock. Its patent-protected, gateway-free Wi-Fi direct technology sits inside tens of thousands of locking devices across 65+ countries. In 2023 Walter was named a Security Industry Innovator for that WiFi-ready platform.
Andrei Stefan
Andrei Stefan is the co-founder and CEO of Oveit, an Austin-based event technology company that bundles smart ticketing, online bookings, access control and cashless payments into one platform. A Romanian operator with two decades in general management and finance, he moved from corporate boardrooms into startups, helped build a live-shopping and streaming platform during the pandemic, and pushed Oveit early into NFT and blockchain-based tickets through partnerships with Crypto.com and Polygon. Oveit was named by the UN World Tourism Organization in 2019 as one of the five most disruptive startups in tourism.
Steven Humphreys
Steven Humphreys is Deputy CEO of the Hirsch Group (formerly Vitaprotech), a French-headquartered high-security technology company that emerged from the 2024 merger of Vitaprotech and Identiv. Over three decades he has run a string of companies at the seam where the physical and digital worlds meet - SCM Microsystems, ActivCard, and Identiv - building the smart-card readers, secure credentials, and access-control platforms that guard U.S. embassies, federal agencies, and sensitive sites worldwide. A Yale and Stanford engineer who started his career at General Electric, he has spent his life turning identity into infrastructure.
John Martin
John Martin co-founded Level Home in 2016 with the idea that the best technology is invisible - literally. After a snowstorm stranded him and his family at Lake Tahoe without keys, he set out to reinvent the deadbolt from scratch. The result: Level Lock, a smart lock engineered to hide entirely inside the door, preserving home aesthetics while adding full smartphone control. Martin spent decades across Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, and Nokia before building Level into a $171M-funded company that was ultimately acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2024 - a hardware giant recognizing that the future of the lock is invisible.
Dean Drako
Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who has founded more than six companies across cybersecurity, cloud video surveillance, physical access control, and electric vehicles. He invented the IT industry's first spam filter appliance at Barracuda Networks, took the company to a NYSE IPO, then turned his restless attention to cloud video security at Eagle Eye Networks and physical access control at Brivo. In December 2025 he merged both into the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security company, assuming the CEO chair at Brivo. He holds 53+ patents and has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice - a feat as rare as his other hobby: co-founding an electric supercar company.
Samuel Joseph
Samuel Joseph is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hakimo, a San Francisco-based AI security platform that uses computer vision and generative AI to autonomously monitor physical security infrastructure - cameras, badge readers, access control systems - in real time. A Stanford PhD and IIT Madras gold medalist (President's Medal for topping the entire graduating batch of 2016), Joseph built Hakimo to solve a deceptively simple problem: security teams drowning in false alarms. The company has raised $20.5M in total funding, including a $10.5M Series A in March 2025, and protects 400+ properties across self-storage, construction, automotive, higher education, and corporate sectors - saving customers roughly $125,000 per year compared to a human security guard.
Tina D'Agostin
Tina D'Agostin is the CEO of Alcatraz AI, a Cupertino-based company building AI-powered facial authentication for physical access control. With 25+ years in security technology spanning Johnson Controls, Niscayah (Stanley), and executive roles at the intersection of hardware and enterprise software, she leads a company that protects over five million employees at Fortune 500 firms, data centers, airports, and stadiums - positioning Alcatraz as 'the Face ID for physical spaces.' Under her leadership, the company raised a $50M Series B in April 2026, bringing total funding to over $100 million.