HiveWatch announced it has closed $20 million in additional growth funding. This investment is led by former Twitter CEO & COO, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain of 01A, with participation from Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, and Penny Jar Capital (a fund anchored by Stephen Curry), joining early insiders Crosscut Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and SaaS Ventures. This is the company’s second financing announcement since their initial seed round in November 2020, which brings HiveWatch’s total amount raised to $25 million.
By enabling security teams to bring together data from their existing disparate physical security systems and providing them with an intelligent, holistic, and actionable view, HiveWatch is moving corporate safety operations from reactive-only responses to designing proactive programs that identify threats before they happen.
Overall violence in the United States skyrocketed during the pandemic. Violent crime increased and the homicide rate rose 30 percent in 2020, the single largest increase in a century. In a survey conducted by Help Net Security, 71 percent of respondents believe a lack of protective intelligence resulted in missed threats and physical harm to customers and employees. Almost 100 percent of respondents agreed that physical security requires technology-driven standards to better identify, investigate, monitor and manage pending threats. As 2021 continues, companies are expected to experience an influx of security threats, making the need for an increase to security budgets even more critical.
HiveWatch enables organizations to mobilize and modernize their physical security with Multi-sensor Resolution and machine learning. Customers utilize HiveWatch’s Security Fusion Platform to unite siloed security systems’ data, analyze program design and team performance, and securely monitor disparate security systems.
“The future of physical security is fusion,” said Ryan Schonfeld, founder and CEO of HiveWatch. “Technology leaders typically have physical security operations siloed because their legacy systems don’t talk to each other and don't play nice with their cybersecurity tools. Orchestration, behavioral analysis, anomaly detection; these have been solved for cyber. We built HiveWatch to bring the physical side up to speed.”
HiveWatch resonated with the former Twitter executives because of the pain they experienced scaling their physical security programs with their exponential growth.
“When running a company, nothing is more important than your employees.” Said Adam Bain, Managing Partner at 01A. “Prioritizing their safety and security is imperative. You spare no expense to do so but, the reality is that software and hardware products serving the enterprise physical security market are woefully inadequate. They’re antiquated, disconnected from each other, and make responding to incidents impossibly slow. Physical security teams deal with multiple camera feeds, badge swipe alerts, IOT data streams, and disparate interfaces to monitor and respond to issues. When we saw what Ryan was building with HiveWatch, we instantly saw the value and the future of smart physical security. Keeping your team and your company’s assets safe is easier and more efficient with HiveWatch.”
- Today’s funding will help HiveWatch execute on new and existing strategies including:
- Helping security leaders gain the intelligence needed to make their teams more effective
- Building a better and more cohesive customer experience (a first of its kind for the security industry)
- Building a best in class engineering team focused on diversity and inclusion
“I’ve lived with these problems my whole career” Schonfeld said. “I’m excited to deliver a platform to help organizations get smarter about keeping their people safe.”
