SIA New Member Profile: Dragonfruit AI

New Security Industry Association (SIA) member Dragonfruit AI provides an integrated cloud storage and video analytics solution. The company is on a mission to lower the cost of petabyte scale storage. Dragonfruit is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with a satellite location in Bengaluru, India.

SIA spoke with Amit Kumar, founder and CEO at Dragonfruit, about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

AK: Our team has been interested in the security space for years and had been looking at emerging IT trends around cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) closely. We wanted to find a way to help security professionals do their jobs better, using cutting-edge technology. After hundreds of conversations with end users and integrators, we narrowed our focus down to the key problem: Surveillance video is exploding, but the tools to do effective forensic investigations are quite antiquated.

We ended up building a lot of foundational technology (with many patents pending) at the intersection of video, cloud and AI. We packaged it all up into an intuitive solution that helps end users store, manage and analyze their surveillance footage extremely quickly and store all of it extremely affordably.

We’ve been operating in stealth mode so far, and we are excited to finally reveal the product and success we’ve been having with our customers!

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings/company unique?

AK: We focus on the needs of large organizations that manage many locations, each with hundreds of cameras. Many of these organizations have compliance requirements that require longer-term storage of video (over two months), increasing the storage and management cost burden – something we are well positioned to solve. In addition, managing forensic investigations on an ongoing basis, across many different locations, with different video management system installations, is quite burdensome, and no good solutions exist to manage this. This is where we shine.

Scalable and cost-effective storage, cutting-edge investigative tools that save time and money and AI analytics complete with affordable video summarization – we bring it all together in one place.

What’s something we might not know about your company – or something new you’re doing in security?

AK: We are the first true AI company that combines storage and analytics, and the very first, industry-wide, to once and for all really solve the holy grail of problems – bandwidth constraints and high storage costs. We’re also completely user-focused – working backwards from the needs of security professionals, while providing decision makers cost-effective tools. We’re also great partners to integrators, working hand in hand with them to solve their customers’ needs.

What is your company’s vision, and what are your goals for the security industry?

AK: We help companies manage their security footage in a safe, secure, scalable, cost-effective way while decreasing the time and cost spent in forensic investigations.

What do you think are the biggest opportunities in the security industry right now?

AK: We believe that there is an unmet need for video storage solutions that focuses not just on the raw price of storing petabytes of archival video, but also on solving the needs of security professionals on a day-to-day basis, helping them speedily investigate and resolve cases. We think the new cloud and AI/ML technologies can help and hope companies like Dragonfruit step in to help the ecosystem.

What are the biggest challenges facing your company and/or others in the security industry?

AK: In some sense, the security industry has been around forever, and even video camera surveillance is over 50 years old. As such, many promises have been made, particularly around analytics, that have fallen short. We feel the key challenge is to rebuild trust with end customers by under-promising and over-delivering.

We think the way to do that is to build products that make today’s tasks 10 times easier to perform while deploying new technology only if it actually works and in a way that allows customers to try it out before committing a large amount of time or resources. We are practicing what we preach by making all of our AI analytics available for use on a pay-as-you-go basis, so the customers can really get a sense of the possibilities before fully committing.

We feel there’s a lot of complexity in the security industry and a lot of hype introduced by companies (including ours!) and providing flexibility to customers is the way to address it.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

AK: SIA is a really great resource for us, and the conferences are extremely valuable. We hope to network with other great companies and work together to make our customers successful!

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association (SIA).