Coram AI, an innovator in LLM-powered video security, announced it raised $13.8 million in Series A funding in a round led by Battery Ventures. And existing investors 8VC and Mosaic Ventures also participated in the round.
As part of the funding, Battery Partner Marcus Ryu, the former co-founder and CEO of Guidewire Software, joins Coram’s board. And Coram plans to use the funding from the round to build more product lines and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Coram — which was founded by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondruska, both former executives in Lyft’s autonomous driving division — provides a novel AI-based security platform that helps customers ranging from schools to manufacturers better monitor their sites to improve safety and efficiency dramatically. And Coram’s platform minimizes customer infrastructure overhead by working with any IP camera in existing camera installations. This technology uses advanced vision and language models for real-time video analysis from security cameras, enabling searches described in natural language and advanced applications such as virtual security guards capable of interpreting complex activities over long timespans.
The platform tackles the critical needs of customers across education, logistics, and manufacturing by automatically analyzing camera footage in real time to detect threats and surface safety issues and provide operational insights that reduce waste.
For example, Coram provides its customers in K-12 education with an immediate alert if a potential threat, such as someone brandishing a weapon, is detected on the premises. Similarly, a user at a manufacturing plant can quickly sift through thousands of hours of footage to isolate recorded slip-and-fall incidents, helping train managers to prevent such accidents in the future.
This software can also detect license plates, recognize faces, and issue alerts if a known offender is identified on-site. And this addresses a significant problem for businesses: There are over 80 million security cameras in the U.S. (and more than 500 million worldwide, excluding China), yet most video recordings remain unseen on hard drives, leaving valuable insights untapped. Coram’s customers include Middletown Unified School District in California and PCC Community Markets in Washington.
Jain holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University and was previously a director of engineering at Lyft, where he led the Autonomy & AI team in the company’s self-driving program, which was acquired by Woven Planet, a Toyota subsidiary, in 2021. And his co-founder, Ondruska, who is Coram’s CTO, holds a Ph.D. in robotics from Oxford University and was the co-founder of Blue Vision Labs, a computer vision startup bought by Lyft.
KEY QUOTES:
“With the new generation of AI, human-level understanding of video is finally possible. We envision cameras evolving far beyond being mere video recorders—they will become a constant pair of eyes that keeps the public safe and secure in a privacy-sensitive manner. We’re excited to bring the breakthroughs in large vision models to public safety. We witnessed firsthand how this technology accelerated the development of self-driving cars and significantly enhanced public safety.”
– Ashesh Jain, Coram’s CEO
“AI holds the key to unlocking value in the exabytes of unwatched video footage generated every day by security cameras, but delivering this value intuitively and cost-effectively to customers is a very hard challenge. Ashesh and Peter combine deep academic expertise in video processing and machine learning with technical pragmatism developed in the demanding domain of self-driving vehicles. This combination makes them, in my view, the ideal founding team to build winning consumer and enterprise video AI products for the vast security and safety markets.”
– Marcus Ryu, Partner at Battery Ventures
