Umbo CV Security Cameras to prevent crime

Umbo CV has raised a $2.8 million in seed round funding for its security cameras based on artificial intelligence to identify suspicious activity, which human guards might miss, and prevent crimes before they happen. The funding was directed by AppWorks Ventures, Mesh Ventures, Wistron Corp and Phison Electronics and will be used for research and hiring.

Umbo CV has already received $1.4 million in pre-orders and has got its systemshipped—including cameras and a cloud-based management platform—to clients in Dubai, the United States, and Europe, and will begin mass manufacturing next month.

Shawn Guan, Co-founder and chief executive officer who has spent more than seven years working in the surveillance technology industry says, “In the industry, I got frustrated with spending so much money in building infrastructure but not getting a lot out of it. People still get away with crimes, so we have to find a way to solve it.”

According to Shawn, Umbo CV was created because he wanted to focus on something besides developing high-definition videos, which many companies use as their chief selling point. “That doesn’t help customers solve problems in the security industry because it can only give you high-quality video after the event has occurred. If someone gets hurt, we can show clients a better video, but that didn’t stop someone from being hurt,” he tells TechCrunch.

Umbo CV is likely to face stiff competition from manufacturers such as Huawei and Seagate, which are working on smart security cameras, and systems like AISight. However, Umbo CV wants to be recognized for building algorithms that blend images from multiple cameras and scan them for aberrations. By scanning for anomalies, Umbo CV’s AI “doesn’t necessarily know what kind of event it is, but it knows what is not normal so we can point it out to security officers,” says Guan.