Insider Brief
- Coram AI raises $13.8M in Series A funding, led by Battery Ventures, with participation from 8VC and Mosaic Ventures, to expand product offerings and scale its go-to-market and engineering teams.
- Founded by former Lyft executives, Coram’s AI-native video security platform uses advanced vision and language models for real-time analysis, enabling natural language searches, virtual security guards, and safety insights across sectors like education, logistics, and manufacturing.
- The platform works with any existing IP cameras, addressing critical safety needs, enhancing public security, and unlocking untapped insights from billions of hours of unwatched video footage.
PRESS RELEASE — Coram AI, a pioneer in LLM-powered video security, has announced it has raised $13.8 million in Series A funding in a round led by Battery Ventures, a global, technology-focused investment firm. Existing investors 8VC and Mosaic Ventures also participated in the round.
As part of the financing, Battery Partner Marcus Ryu, the former co-founder and CEO of Guidewire Software, joins Coram’s board. Coram intends to use the proceeds from the round to build more product lines and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Coram — founded by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondruska, both former executives in Lyft’s autonomous driving division — offers a novel, AI-native security platform that helps customers ranging from schools to manufacturers better monitor their sites to dramatically improve safety and efficiency. Coram’s platform minimizes infrastructure overhead for customers by working with any IP camera in existing camera installations. The 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 addresses the critical needs of customers across education, logistics, and manufacturing by automatically analyzing camera footage in real-time to detect threats, surface safety issues, and provide operational insights that reduce waste.
“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,” said Jain, Coram’s CEO. “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.”
For example, Coram serves its customers in K-12 education by transmitting an immediate alert if a potential threat, such as someone brandishing a gun, 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 to train managers to prevent such accidents in the future.
The software can also detect license plates, recognize faces, and issue alerts if a known offender is identified on-site. This addresses a major 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.
“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,” said Marcus Ryu, Partner at Battery Ventures. “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.”
Jain, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University, 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. 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 acquired by Lyft.
About Coram AI
Coram is a leader in AI-native, hardware-agnostic video security. The company, founded by two AI and robotics experts with experience in autonomous driving, makes an innovative security platform to help customers in sectors such as K-12 education, manufacturing and logistics better monitor their sites to dramatically improve safety and efficiency. For more information, visit www.coram.ai.
Contacts
Rebecca Buckman
Battery Ventures/for Coram
becky@battery.com
650–292–2772
