Augur, a London national security startup co-founded by Palantir alums that is building an AI-based analytics platform to “read” data from sensors in public venues and other physical spaces to detect threats, has raised $15 million in seed funding to expand its business.
The startup is not disclosing who customers are, but CEO Harry Mead — who founded the company with Imran Lone and Stefan Kopieczek (respectively CTO and head of engineering) — said the list includes large venue operators and infrastructure owners and other parties focused on public safety and security.
“A lot of our customer conversions have been in the last couple of months,” Mead said in an interview, adding that this is part of what has been attracting the funding.
Plural, the London VC that is building out a large portfolio of defence tech startups, is leading this investment, with participation also from First Kind, Flix, Tiny VC and SNR — a busy list that speaks to the number of investors that are moving into the same space as Plural. There is no valuation being disclosed today, and it looks like Augur might be raising even while closing, as the final number of this seed round changed three times in the last week.
If triangulation is part of what might make one video surveillance company more effective than another, you might say the same for the experience of that company’s founders.
Lone and Kopieczek both worked as reliability engineers at Palantir, tasked with ensuring that its data analytics remained operational and understanding why it didn’t when it did not, giving them some understanding into how to action data points.
Mead, meanwhile, once started and ran a private members club, which now appears to be defunct but did expose him to what goes into running venues. He also once started an app called Path that tracked people, but for a good cause. Founded after a high-profile murder of a young woman in London who was walking home one night, Path let users designate several people to know where they were walking and to suggest safe routes to take. This too seems to no longer be active.
Grey-zone is the hot zone
Augur’s business “opportunity”, such as it is, is the rise of so-called “grey-zone” threats. This concept describes a wide range of nefarious activity between adversaries that falls short of violent conflict but can still be very destructive and dangerous. It is considered an important facet of national security, especially in the current technological and geopolitical climate. The jury is still out on what the best approaches are for detecting and stopping grey-zone threats.
Augur’s bet is that it’s unrealistic to assume that venue and infrastructure operators will be able to upgrade to lots of new hardware to address grey-zone threats (one approach); and that too much data reach may violate data protection rules (another controversial approach).
“We aim for the highest accuracy that doesn’t require facial recognition,” Mead said. “It’s a system that allows these networks to maintain privacy.”
Augur’s solution is to harness what is already being recorded and tracked with CCTV cameras, other sensors in physical environments and eventually a wider range of other sensors, to build anonymised systems to understand that activity in a deeper way to find and stop those needles in the haystacks.
Mead describes what it does as a “perception engine”, which uses a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf AI models. Its longer-term goal, he added, is to be able to run “hostile reconnaissance detection” covering a range of different hardware and environments — tapping, for example, the sensors on drones to understand what is going on in a particular environment.
“We focus on cameras now but we are a sensor fusion company,” he said. “We can integrate a number of sensors and data sources such as counter-UAS systems. Our goal is to increase the resilience of all NATO infrastructure.”
There are a number of surveillance and data-intelligence companies already active in the market, with some of the bigger names including Spot AI, Eagle Eye, and Verkada, not to mention Palantir, among many others. Part of the bet from investors seems to be that new players need to emerge that can operate from a clean slate and learn from the missteps of others.
“When it comes to protecting our people and critical infrastructure, we cannot afford to be as complacent and naive as we were in protecting Ukraine,” said Khaled Helioui, partner at Plural, in a statement. “The new focus on grey zone warfare and domestic sabotage is not a threat we are currently equipped to contain. Protecting our critical infrastructure is one of the defining challenges of this generation.”
