HiveWatch, an LA-based startup that uses multi-sensor fusion to help companies better respond to physical security threats, has secured $20 million in Series A funding led by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.
The former Twitter execs — Costolo as CEO and COO, and Bain served as COO — say HiveWatch resonated with them because of the pain they experienced scaling their own physical security programs.
”When running a company, nothing is more important than your employees. Prioritizing their safety and security is imperative,” says Bain, who along with Costolo is now managing partner at venture and advisory firm 01A. “You spare no expense to do so but, the reality is that software and hardware products serving the enterprise physical security market are woefully inadequate. They’re antiquated, disconnected from each other, and make responding to incidents impossibly slow. When we saw what Ryan was building with HiveWatch, we instantly saw the value and the future of smart physical security.”
HiveWatch claims its intelligent approach to security helps organizations to modernize their physical security. Using sensor fusion (the collection of data from multiple sensors) and machine learning, the startup’s platform pulls data from a company’s disparate monitoring systems and security sensors to provide operators the information to evaluate and respond to alerts. This, the startup claims, can help organizations to move corporate safety operations from reactive-only responses to designing proactive programs that identify threats before they happen.
“Existing companies who try to solve physical security problems typically fall into two camps: they are either tech-driven or security-driven,” HiveWatch CEO and founder Ryan Schonfeld told TechCrunch. “The technically inspired companies have leadership that is solely focused on the advancement of technology at all costs, and then there’s the security practitioner inspired, which are too far from the leading-edge technology or the required talent to execute on the solution.
“HiveWatch’s approach has been to bridge the gap. We’ve brought together incredible technical and security practitioners, not just to build new tech capabilities for security programs, but to collect meaningful data from their sensors and their operational processes so security leaders can constantly improve on their existing installed systems. Failures in program design shouldn’t be identified after something bad happens. That’s too late.”
The startup’s Series A investment, which lands less than a year after the startup’s $5 million seed raise, also saw participation from Lachy Groom, Elad Gil and Penny Jar Capital, along with early HiveWatch investors Crosscut Ventures, Freestyle Capital and SaaS Ventures.
Schonfeld, who previously served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of State, says HiveWatch will use the newly raised funds to build a better and more cohesive customer experience and a best-in-class engineering team focused on diversity and inclusion.