Accel-backed Eagle Eye Networks Brings In $40M Series E For Video Surveillance

Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud video surveillance company, raised $40 million in Series E funding from Accel to advance its platform.

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Dean Drako, founder and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks, touts that the Austin-based company is leading the charge in the transition of video surveillance to the cloud.

The company’s video management system integrates with other application programming interfaces to provide recording, security and encryption, as well as broad analog and digital camera support. It also works with industry cameras so customers don’t have to rip out and replace their existing cameras, he said.

“Ninety percent of video surveillance is still not on the cloud, and we are the dominant player that is moving the traditional business to the cloud,” he told Crunchbase News. “In the cloud, we can start to do amazing artificial intelligence on the videos so that instead of customers having to sift through the videos manually, we can go through them and find people of interest, notify someone if their office is messy or even when guns are detected.”

Including the new funding, Eagle Eye has raised a total of $100 million since the company was founded in 2012. That includes a $20 million Series C round in 2018, according to Crunchbase data.

Sameer Gandhi, partner at Accel, said in an interview that he has known Drako for years, going all the way back to when Drako founded Barracuda Networks, a cloud security company.

“With every other market segment, there is a push to shift to the cloud, which is a more efficient deployment method, and the video surveillance industry is one of the last ones to do that,” Gandhi said. “Dean saw the business accelerating and being more aggressive.”

Historically, the funding enabled Eagle Eye to build its cloud infrastructure and service to actually transmit video to the cloud, which included organizing and making videos accessible, as well as adding APIs and applications on top of that for customers, Drako said.

This new funding will be used to expand sales and marketing and invest in AI, particularly for new projects such as license plate recognition and elevated temperature screening. The company is also planning to add employees. There are more than 75 job openings, and Drako said he aims to bring on 100 to 125 new hires within the next year.

Meanwhile, while he would not disclose revenue figures, he revealed that Eagle Eye is experiencing high double-digit growth, which has been pretty consistent over the past four years.

Depending on the survey, the current market size for video surveillance is between $25 billion and $40 billion globally and growing 10 percent per year, Drako said. He predicts that the AI portion will increase the market significantly.

“We have just scratched the surface,” he added. “There are literally hundreds of millions of cameras in the world.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias