Verkada, the fast-rising security technology startup, has secured a $100 million funding round led by CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Alphabet (Google), cementing its position at a lofty $5.8 billion valuation.
This latest investment marks a $1.3 billion jump from its Series E funding in February. It underscores Silicon Valley’s intense focus on applying advanced Artificial Intelligence to the traditionally sluggish physical security sector, a market estimated to be worth $60 billion.
Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC that the primary appeal for the Google venture arm was the company’s vision: “I think Google saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI and everything we’re driving to apply AI to the physical security industry.”
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The new capital will be used to bolster Verkada’s AI capabilities and provide liquidity to employees and early investors.
Disruption in a “Sleeping Market”
Verkada has rapidly become a leader in what CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto calls a “sleeping $60 billion market” dominated by legacy hardware—“cameras that just record, not cameras that think.” Verkada’s platform disrupts this by connecting physical security products—including cameras, alarms, and sensors—under a single, cloud-based software platform, moving security from a reactive to a proactive intelligence system.
The company has successfully scaled its operations, surpassing $1 billion in annualized bookings across a global customer base of 30,000 businesses, including retailers, government properties, schools, transportation companies, and infrastructure providers like TeraWatt Infrastructure (which supplies charging sites to electric vehicles like Google’s Waymo).
The AI Advantage
Verkada’s valuation surge is directly tied to the power of its AI-driven analytics. Zanutto noted, “The genius of Filip and the team of Verkada is that they’re leveraging AI as a Rosetta Stone to really help unlock insights from cameras to help companies become safer and more efficient.”
The company’s system captures over 20 million images per hour, processing that data to provide meaningful insights beyond simple security alerts, such as foot traffic, occupancy rates, security violations, and other critical business trends.
A key recent innovation is the AI-Powered Unified Timeline, which was one of over 60 new AI features and platform updates rolled out in September. The tool uses sophisticated face detection and attribute-based re-identification to automatically synthesize video events from all cameras across a property.
Rather than requiring security teams to manually dig through hours or even days of footage, the Unified Timeline visually reconstructs the entire journey of people and vehicles onto a single, map-based timeline in seconds. This allows security teams to efficiently track suspects, identify getaway vehicles, or search for missing individuals, thereby dramatically accelerating investigation and response times.
Empowering, Not Replacing, Human Security
Kaliszan pushed back against the notion that AI-powered technology will replace human security personnel, stating, “I think humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think.”
Instead, he framed AI as an essential tool for augmenting human capabilities: “But AI can empower these first responders to be more aware, to have situational knowledge, to know what to do, and in some cases, actually prevent the problems from happening,” he said.
He cited real-world examples, such as the Louvre museum heist in October, as an opportunity where actively monitoring, AI-assisted devices that could immediately alert security forces would be far more effective than relying on static cameras and physical personnel alone.
“If you could intervene right then, if you could know in real time that that’s happening, the potential for savings and preventing damage is tremendous,” Kaliszan concluded.
Verkada’s successful funding round further validates CapitalG’s heavy investment thesis in the security and AI convergence space, following its recent contribution to a $435 million fundraise for cybersecurity startup Armis in November.