Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada.
Courtesy: Verkada
Security‑technology startup Verkada announced Wednesday that it has closed a new financing round led by CapitalG, the venture‑capital arm of Alphabet. The transaction takes the company’s valuation to $5.8 billion, up $1.3 billion from its Series E round earlier this year.
“Google saw the strategic opportunity in applying artificial intelligence to physical security, and we share that vision,” Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan told CNBC.
The $100 million infusion will primarily fund the acceleration of Verkada’s AI product stack and provide additional liquidity for future growth initiatives.
An insider familiar with the terms requested anonymity but confirmed the amount and the valuation uplift.
CapitalG has been active in the broader cyber‑security space, most recently backing a $435 million raise for Armis in November.
Verkada’s latest funding arrives at a pivotal moment: the company now reports more than $1 billion in annualized bookings across roughly 30,000 enterprise customers worldwide.
Verkada builds an end‑to‑end cloud platform that unifies cameras, alarms, sensors and access‑control hardware under a single software layer, enabling customers to manage physical‑security operations from a centralized dashboard.
The customer base spans retail chains, municipal facilities, K‑12 schools, higher‑education campuses and transportation hubs.
One notable partnership is with TeraWatt Infrastructure, a provider of electric‑vehicle charging sites for fleets such as Waymo. TeraWatt leverages Verkada’s analytics to protect high‑value charging assets and monitor site activity.
In September, Verkada shipped more than 60 AI‑driven features, including the “AI‑Powered Unified Timeline,” which automatically stitches video clips from multiple cameras into a coherent, searchable visual narrative.
The Unified Timeline cuts investigation time dramatically. Instead of manually reviewing dozens of separate video feeds, security teams receive a single, chronologically ordered playback that highlights motion events and flagged anomalies.
“What sets Filip and his team apart is their use of AI as a Rosetta Stone—translating raw video data into actionable insights that make workplaces safer and more efficient,” CapitalG general partner Derek Zanutto remarked.
Verkada’s cameras capture upwards of 20 million images per hour. At that scale, the platform can extract high‑resolution metrics such as foot‑traffic heatmaps, occupancy rates, and real‑time detection of security breaches, feeding data into enterprise asset‑management and operational‑efficiency tools.
The physical‑security market, estimated at roughly $60 billion, is still dominated by legacy hardware that records video without interpretation. Verkada’s AI‑first approach aims to shift the industry toward “thinking cameras” that can pre‑empt incidents rather than merely document them.
While AI is transforming the backend of security operations, Kaliszan cautions that human guards remain essential.
“Humans will continue to protect other humans for the foreseeable future,” he said. “AI empowers first responders with situational awareness, guides decision‑making, and in some cases can avert an incident before it escalates.”
The recent Louvre heist, in which several priceless artifacts were stolen, illustrates a use‑case where AI‑enabled cameras could have triggered an immediate alert, enabling a rapid response that might have prevented the loss.
“If you can intervene in real time, the cost savings and damage avoidance are enormous,” Kaliszan added, underscoring the commercial upside of AI‑augmented security for high‑value assets.
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