The Veterans Who Bet Security Belongs in the Cloud, Not a Closet

Everyone who has ever managed a building remembers the box. It hummed in a wiring closet or under a receptionist's desk, a beige recorder wired to a wall of cameras, and nobody wanted to touch it. When it filled up, footage vanished. When it died, the cameras kept staring at nothing. That box is the thing YourSix set out to kill.

Founded in 2015 in Roseville, Minnesota, YourSix sells physical security the way software companies sell everything else - as a subscription. Its platform, Y6OS, connects cameras, door readers, speakers and sensors straight to the cloud, then wraps them in AI analytics and 24/7 professional monitoring. No on-site server. No bridge. No appliance quietly rotting in a closet. Just power, an internet connection, and a single dashboard.

The category has a clunky name - Physical Security as a Service, or PSaaS - but the idea is simple, and it is the same idea that moved email, files and phone systems off local hardware years ago. YourSix's bet is that cameras and doors are next.

01What YourSix actually does

Most security vendors sell you one thing well: a camera line, or an access-control system, or a monitoring contract. YourSix's pitch is convergence - putting all of it behind one pane of glass. Video surveillance, access control, audio, sensors and detection all report to the same cloud operating system, and the AI running on top of them watches for anomalies rather than waiting for a human to scrub through footage after something goes wrong.

The architecture is the part worth slowing down on. Y6OS is what the company calls serverless and direct-to-cloud: supported devices connect without a local recorder or gateway appliance in between. Footage lives in the cloud and, for redundancy, locally too, so a dropped internet link does not blind the site. On-site users still get fast local streaming; everyone else gets access from anywhere. The result is fewer boxes to buy, fewer boxes to maintain, and a system that scales by adding a device instead of adding hardware to a rack.

02The old way vs. the YourSix way

The clearest way to understand the company is to line its model up against the thing it replaces. Traditional on-premises security is a capital purchase: you buy recorders and servers, you own the maintenance, and you grow by buying more hardware. YourSix reframes the whole thing as an operating expense you can turn up or down.

That shift also changes who does the watching. YourSix bundles professional monitoring into the service, along with proactive health monitoring that flags a failing camera or a firmware issue before a customer notices. The company says it answers 95% of support calls within 30 seconds - an unusually specific brag for a security vendor, and a tell about where it thinks it competes: on the experience, not just the hardware.

03Who buys it

YourSix aims at multi-location businesses with high-value assets - the kind of operation where a single-site camera app falls apart and someone in a head office needs to see every site at once. Its customers span roughly 14 industries: agriculture, banking and finance, healthcare, retail, logistics and transportation, manufacturing and education among them. It sells directly and through channel partners and master agents, which is how a 75-person company reaches a national footprint.

04Where it sits in a crowded market

Cloud video is not a lonely category. YourSix competes with well-funded names - Verkada, Rhombus, Eagle Eye Networks with Brivo, Arcules, Genetec, Cisco Meraki, OpenEye, Spot AI and others. Independent industry analysts at IPVM, in a 2023 comparison, rated YourSix below the biggest players on some dimensions, so this is not a story about a company that has already won. It is a story about positioning.

YourSix's chosen edge is openness. Where several rivals lock customers into proprietary cameras and a single cloud, YourSix leans on an Axis-friendly, open-technology approach and pitches the avoidance of platform lock-in as a feature. Its partnership with Axis Communications runs deep enough that Axis named it Cloud Provider of the Year in both 2018 and 2019. For a buyer wary of being trapped in one vendor's hardware roadmap, that is the argument.

05The founder, and the name

The company is named after a piece of military slang. "I've got your six" means I've got your back - your six o'clock, the position directly behind you. That is not marketing paint applied after the fact; it comes from the founder. Eric Styles, CEO, Chairman and co-founder, spent six years on active duty in the U.S. Army before two decades across security, telecom and IT, including running his own technology company. The Army, he says, gave him a service-first way of leading and a habit of calm decisions under pressure.

That heritage shows up in the org chart and the paperwork. YourSix is a service-disabled veteran-owned business, and it runs on four plainly worded values - "Got Your Back," "Push Possible," "Be a Good Human" and "Keep It Simple" - along with the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) framework that a lot of Midwestern operators swear by. It is a culture built to sound like a squad, not a startup.

06The numbers and the money

Growth came before the venture money. In 2021 YourSix landed at #208 on the Inc. 5000 with 2,145% growth over three years - roughly four times the list's median - which made it the #6 security company on the list and #2 in Minnesota. The same year it ranked #12 on the Vet100 of fastest-growing veteran-owned businesses. Then, in June 2024, it raised a $10.5 million Series A led by Vocap Partners with Eastside Partners joining, part of roughly $16 million raised across three rounds. The money is earmarked for growth and for advancing the Y6OS platform.

07What you could copy - and where it breaks

The transferable lesson here is not "cameras." It is that a stale, hardware-heavy category can be re-sold as a service if you also take over the parts customers hate - the maintenance, the monitoring, the scaling. YourSix did not just move recording to the cloud; it absorbed the operational burden and made responsiveness a product feature. That template works in plenty of industries still shipping beige boxes.

Where it strains: cloud-first assumes reliable connectivity and buyers comfortable with off-site footage, and the biggest names in the category have more funding and scale. Independent reviewers have rated YourSix behind the leaders on some counts. The open-technology angle is a real differentiator, but "less lock-in" is a harder thing to sell than a flashy all-in-one dashboard. YourSix's counter is the boring, durable one - answer the phone in 40 seconds, keep the system honest, and let the subscription math do the rest.