Physical security startup Coram AI has raised $35 million in a round co-led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures, with participation from UP Partners, 8VC, and Mosaic Ventures. This brings its total funding to $66 million.
The San Francisco-based company was cofounded by Ashesh Jain, formerly head of autonomy at Lyft's self-driving division, and Peter Ondruska, who led AI research at Lyft before moving to Toyota's Woven division after it acquired Lyft's self-driving unit in 2021.
Coram operates an AI platform that integrates video surveillance, access control, visitor logs, and emergency response into a single interface. The company's software is deployed on-premise and is built to work with cameras and infrastructure organisations already own, sidestepping costly hardware overhauls, Jain told ET.
"We spent years building AI that helps cars read a scene and act before someone gets hurt. The same approach protects places where people live and work: catch risks earlier, and keep schools, hospitals, and workplaces safer instead of just documenting what went wrong," Jain, who’s also the CEO, said.
The new funds will be used to accelerate product development, expand the go-to-market and customer success teams, and grow its engineering presence in Bengaluru, which the company describes as a key hub for building its global platform.
Since its $13.8 million Series A round last year, the company claims to have quadrupled revenues and tripled its customer base. It now covers over 1,500 sites across the US and Canada, including Fortune 500 companies, school districts, healthcare providers, and municipalities.
According to Jain, most physical security systems in place now are reactive, i.e., they record incidents rather than flagging them, and that the same advances in AI perception used in autonomous vehicles can be applied to make security operations more proactive.
"There is a monetary benefit of integrating all the security aspects on one platform through Coram, but the more important return on investment (ROI) for customers is increased proactive security, compliance with standards like Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and reduced insurance costs," Jain said.
The platform is deployed on-premise at the customer site to ensure data privacy, while maintaining full cloud accessibility for mobile and desktop users. The current customer base, predominantly located in the United States and Canada, includes government facilities, schools, hospitals, retail, and manufacturing sectors.
The startup is also launching a new capability called Deep Investigation, which deploys autonomous agents to analyse videos, access events, and visitor activity across cameras, locations, and time to answer complex security queries with the evidence attached. These agents can conclude investigations in minutes as opposed to the hours it took previously.
The company runs offices in the Bay Area, London, and Bengaluru.
