physical-security
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Rob Frechette Wants the Camera Business to Stop Selling Cameras
After years on the reseller side of physical security, Rob Frechette crossed the counter. His pitch at Spot AI is blunt: let partners keep the customer, keep the cameras and sell what the footage can do.
Alexandra Ozerkis Learned to Sell the Invisible
The Evolv Technology CMO spent two decades translating complicated categories, from trade associations to AI screening. Now her brief is to turn trust, fieldwork and careful language into growth.
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.
Lukas Quanstrom Is Turning Security's Messy Signals Into a Business Language
The Ontic co-founder has spent his career making scattered information useful. His larger bet is that corporate security earns influence when it can turn signals into decisions, quickly and clearly.
Christopher Hugman Turned the Site Walk’s Messy Minutes Into a Living Map
A customer’s awkward question exposed a failure hiding in plain sight. Hugman’s answer was to give cameras, doors, notes and decisions one visual place to live.
Eric Smith Built a Career by Asking Security to Prove It
For nearly three decades, the Lares co-founder has treated cybersecurity as a claim that must survive contact with reality. His work helped give penetration testers a shared playbook - and executives a more useful question than “Are we compliant?”
Eric Styles Built a Security Company Around Three Words: I’ve Got Your Back
The YourSix CEO turned an Army phrase into a company promise - then built a partner-led cloud platform designed to replace rooms of security hardware with one operating system.
Alex Pachikov Built a Security Guard That Takes Off
A noise outside his house gave Alex Pachikov an idea. A pandemic nearly killed it. Now Sunflower Labs is turning autonomous drones into roaming eyes for airports, rail yards and other hard-to-watch places.
Shawn Guan
Shawn Guan is the CEO and co-founder of Umbo Computer Vision, an AI company building autonomous video security systems that watch camera feeds and flag real threats instead of stray animals and swaying trees. After roughly 2,000 client meetings in the traditional surveillance business taught him how badly false alarms wear people down, he co-founded Umbo in 2014 with Ping-Lin Chang and Tingfan Wu to put deep learning behind the lens. The company raised about $17.6 million, won a Best Startup nod at NVIDIA's 2016 deep learning conference and SIA's Best in Video Analytics in 2017, and ran offices in San Francisco, Taipei and London.
Greg Colaluca
Greg Colaluca is the CEO of Intellicene, a unified security management and situational intelligence software company formerly known as Cognyte Situational Intelligence Solutions and now owned by Volaris Group. He stepped in as general manager in mid-2024 and took the CEO title, steering the business toward a customer-first culture and intelligent, AI-driven security platforms for mission-critical environments. His career spans more than 20 years of global operations leadership at Sensormatic, Astreya Partners, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with a focus on customer success, growth, and operational excellence.
Paul Mazzo
Paul Mazzo is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Technology Integrators, Inc., an IT services firm specializing in structured cabling, network integration, physical security, audio/visual systems, and managed services. He has led the company since January 2004, following a stint as Project Director of Information Technology at Pfizer. His work sits at the seam where copper meets code - the unglamorous plumbing that keeps modern enterprises running.
Michael Green
Michael Green is the CEO and co-founder of Athena Security, an Austin-based company that builds AI-powered concealed weapons detection systems for schools, hospitals, casinos, and other public spaces. A Harvard-educated former family-business operator turned compliance-software builder, Green pivoted into physical security after surviving a close encounter with gunfire. He leads a roughly 110-person company that has raised $18.6 million to keep guns out of the places where people gather.
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.
Jordan Wallach
Jordan Wallach is the co-founder and CEO of Belfry, a New York-based vertical SaaS company building the operating system for physical security firms. A Stanford math-and-computing grad who passed through Microsoft and McKinsey, he bet his career on one of the least glamorous corners of the economy: the back office of America's 8,000 security-guard companies. In January 2025 Belfry raised a $12 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, taking total funding past $20 million, to consolidate scheduling, timekeeping, payroll and billing into a single platform for a roughly $50 billion industry.
Jasvir Gill
Jasvir Gill is the Founder and CEO of AlertEnterprise, a Fremont-based enterprise SaaS platform that converges physical security, cybersecurity, and identity governance through AI. A serial entrepreneur who immigrated from Punjab in 1985, Gill previously founded Virsa Systems — a pioneer in governance, risk, and compliance software — which was acquired by SAP in 2006. He then built the SAP GRC business unit before leaving to found AlertEnterprise in 2007. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, the company has become an industry leader in cyber-physical security convergence, deploying AI-powered access control and identity management for critical infrastructure, utilities, and enterprise clients worldwide.
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.
Mike Promotico
Mike Promotico is the President and CEO of ProTelesis Corporation, a San Diego-based managed IT services provider he has helped build into a West Coast powerhouse over 37+ years in telecommunications. Starting as a principal at INet Corp in 1987 and helping grow it into one of North America's largest Mitel resellers, Promotico has spent three decades bridging the gap between traditional telecom and modern IT - co-founding Technology Assurance Group, leading Standard Tel Networks, and ultimately guiding ProTelesis through eight strategic acquisitions including the 2025 cyber-physical convergence play with Amer-X Security. Under his leadership, ProTelesis manages over 100,000 endpoints for more than 10,000 customers across the U.S.
Ashesh Jain
Ashesh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Coram AI, a Sunnyvale-based startup turning ordinary IP security cameras into AI-powered intelligence endpoints. A Cornell PhD and IIT Delhi alumnus, Jain spent years at the frontier of autonomous vehicles - building perception systems at Zoox and leading Lyft's self-driving program as Head of Autonomy - before pivoting that expertise into reimagining physical security. His research work includes Brain4Cars (a car that predicts driver errors before they happen) and the award-winning Structural-RNN paper (CVPR 2016 Best Student Paper), which has over 1,600 citations. Coram AI raised a $13.8M Series A in January 2025 led by Battery Ventures, and its platform now monitors thousands of cameras across schools, hospitals, warehouses, and manufacturing sites across the U.S.
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.