Firms Eye Video Surveillance

Magazine Feature/June 26, 2006

Every day, 30 million surveillance cameras beam down on America’s malls, ATMs, parking lots, railway platforms, airports, you name it. And as the technology shrinks, the cameras slip deeper into the background, hardly noticed, streaming more than 4 billion hours of footage a week—footage that usually ends up lost, and never seen.

David Anthony says the final chapter in the surveillance story is about to be rewritten. Mr. Anthony is a general partner at New York City-based 21Ventures, a venture firm that just bet $2 million on an Israeli startup that promises to scan every frame for suspicious events and sound the alert. “A human rent-a-cop cannot watch a bank of 50 screens for more than 22 minutes in an hour without going to sleep or not paying attention,” says Mr. Anthony. The Petach Tikva–based startup, Aspectus, has a system that can handle feeds from more than 100 cameras.

Mr. Anthony is not the only VC to have figured that out. In the past year alone, more than eight startups including VideoNext, Vigilos, Aspectus, 3VR Security, and EnVysion have raised their first or second rounds of funding. And their technologies all aim to do roughly the same thing—replace humans with intelligent video systems that capture high-quality images which can be easily searched by time, location, clothing, or facial characteristics.

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