Firefly has emerged from stealth with a $20 million Series A led by Definition Capital, with significant participation from BoxGroup and continued backing from Susa Ventures. The financing will support the company’s development of physical AI products designed to modernize safety technology across education, healthcare, and enterprise organizations.
BoxGroup’s participation represents its third investment in Firefly, while Susa Ventures previously led the company’s seed round. James Batt Buckley and Alex Penn founded Firefly in 2024, bringing backgrounds spanning safety technology, large-scale engineering, and product development.
Before founding Firefly, Buckley worked at Verkada, where he helped scale the company’s Alarms business from serving K-12 schools to Fortune 500 companies. Penn, an MIT graduate, spent nearly a decade at Apple, leading engineering teams and helping bring products from concept to global scale.
Firefly is developing a platform that combines purpose-built hardware, AI-powered software, and existing infrastructure such as cameras and radios into a unified intelligent system. The company is designed to extract intelligence from signals that traditional software has struggled to interpret, connect information across technologies, detect incidents, automate daily operations, and coordinate responses in real time.
The company’s broader goal is to move safety systems beyond simply recording or signaling events toward technology that can understand what is happening and help teams determine what to do next. Firefly is also emphasizing product design and ease of use, with hardware and software intended to simplify complex safety workflows rather than add additional layers of operational complexity.
Firefly is already deploying its technology at Front Range Community College, Colorado’s largest community college. The platform brings information from across three campuses into one system intended to help safety teams understand situations and coordinate responses more effectively.
The new funding will be used to develop additional physical AI products, expand the company’s engineering and machine learning teams, build out its go-to-market organization, and support expansion across education, healthcare, and enterprise customers.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve accepted a strange contradiction in safety technology: the more important the job, the more complicated the tools seem to become. We now have the technology to build something fundamentally different. Our goal is to give the people responsible for safety extraordinary capabilities, while keeping them firmly in control. We’re starting with safety because it’s a problem we know deeply, but what we’re building has the potential to transform how people interact with the physical world.”
James Batt Buckley, Co-Founder And CEO Of Firefly
“People have incredibly intuitive technology in their pockets, but when they go to work protecting others, they’re expected to operate a maze of complicated systems. We didn’t want to accept that. We’ve obsessed over every detail, from the hardware people carry to the software they use and how the two work together. The complexity should be ours to solve, not theirs.”
Alex Penn, Co-Founder And CTO Of Firefly
“The stakes around physical safety have never been higher. At the same time, advances in AI and hardware are making it possible to rethink how organizations protect their people. Firefly is building the central nervous system for physical safety, bringing together specialized hardware, existing data, and coordinated action into a single platform.”
Teddy Citrin, Definition Capital
