• About
  • Article PDF
  • White Papers
  • Listening Tours​
  • Contact
  • Support Us
  • Advertising & Sponsorships
Thursday, January 26, 2023
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
Times Of Entrepreneurship
Growth and Equity for a Changing World
Times Of Entrepreneurship
No Result
View All Result

Two Young Entrepreneurs Take Aim In The Crowded Gun Alarm Market

by Elizabeth Macbride
July 17, 2019
in Deep Tech, New Builders, New Builders, New Builders, New Builders, New Builders, Rest of US
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Aegis founders Sonny Tai and Ben Ziomek
Aegis

The details of what happened on the third floor of Parkland High School last February are excruciating, in part because some parents believe their children’s deaths were avoidable,

Nikolas Cruz spent six minutes and 41 seconds inside the building, If, students on the third floor had had more warning, or if law enforcement had the information to act faster, they might not have died, according to an investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel (the investigation also concluded there were errors by the Broward County police).

A couple of MBA’s from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business say they have a way to make security cameras more effective tools to help information travel faster if there is a shooter in the building. No one was monitoring the security cameras at Parkland, according to the Sun Sentinel.

At $20 per month per security camera, the students, who named the company Aegis AI, have developed AI software that watches security cameras, identifies guns and sends information into whatever information system an institution has developed. For a school with 100 cameras, that would be about $24,000 a year.

“We can draw a box around a gun with AI,” said Sonny Tai, an immigrant from South Africa who came to the United States with his single mom, served as a U.S. Marine for nine years (he enlisted after 9/11 happened while he was in high school) and founded Aegis AI about a year ago with Ben Ziomek.

It’s one of dozens, hundreds or thousands of companies and solutions that have cropped up in recent years to market solutions to schools and other institutions where administrators and executives are fearful of gun violence, especially mass shootings. Last spring, I wrote about new system, one of several on the market, that is being tested to detect weapons through clothing and soft luggage. The Liberty Defense system will likely cost $50,000-$100,000 per entrance and will likely be tested first at stadiums.

Tai and Ziomek met at the business school. The company has landed $300,000 from some top venture capital firms, including MetaProp, a New York City-based real estate technology VC firm, Makan Investments, which invested in ClassPass, and Dormroom Fund, a student entrepreneurship fund run by Silicon Valley’s First Round Capital. The duo said they have also received investments from 14 angels.

Ziomek worked at Microsoft for four years, where he worked on an AI-powered sales process that helped push revenue in his division to more than $100 million. He also worked in venture capital, investing in AI startups at Chicago-based OCA ventures. “I decided I was much more an operator than an investor,” he said.

The two reached out to a YouTuber who runs a channel called Active Self Protection ,which includes video clips of gun crimes, which are then analyzed for lessons learned. The channel enabled Aegis to use 500 videos to develop its software, Ziomek said.

With about a dozen cameras running – Ziomek and Tai said they have verbal commitments from their first 10 clients and are testing their product in two schools – they have a failure rate of about one false positive a week. “Pretty much every automated system has false positives,” Ziomek said.

The other challenges are making sure that the data collected by AI is transparent and immediate for the people – perhaps a chief of security or local law enforcement – that would actually act on the information.

There are significant questions about any of the solutions in the booming school security market. Many are untested; and from a public health perspective, investing even $24,000 in, say, half the salary of a reading aide might make a lot more sense. The chances of any school being involved the target of a mass shooting is  small. There were 94 gun violence incidents in K-12 schools in 2018, and there are around 130K K-12 schools, which leads to a probability of a gun violence incident at an average given school in any given year to be 0.07%.

“The two facts of the matter are that first: They are already spending money on this. Everybody is spending money on things to make parents and students feel safer,” Tai pointed out. “We’re providing something that is cheaper and is effective in that rare case.”

The partners, who say their system doesn’t store any of the footage (lessening privacy concerns), say there are other potential markets for the technology. it could also be trained to do things like locate lost items in an office building, abandoned objects in a public transport system, or identify acts of trespassing. At the moment, they are focused on threat detection. They listed three markets:

  • Infrastructure, including airports, train stations and subway stations, at $600M
  • Education: with 139,000-plus schools in the United States, Aegis estimates the market at $1.56 billion
  • Office buildings, at $2.7 billion

“The total available market for our technology is likely significantly higher than what we had estimated, as we weren’t able to include every possible use-case of real-time threat detection. In the time that we’ve been operating, we’ve also received positive feedback from hospitals, religious institutions, logistics hubs/distribution centers etc., which have not been included in our original model,” Tai wrote in an email.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website.



This story and others on Times of E are made possible by a sponsorship from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation that provides access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity – regardless of race, gender, or geography. The Kansas City, Mo.-based foundation uses its grantmaking, research, programs, and initiatives to support the start and growth of new businesses, a more prepared workforce, and stronger communities. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect with www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.

Elizabeth Macbride

Elizabeth Macbride

A business journalist for 20 years, am the founder of Times of Entrepreneurship and the co-author of The New Builders.

Related Posts

Modern Mexican Food Brands Give Old El Paso The Boot

Modern Mexican Food Brands Give Old El Paso The Boot

by Nina Roberts
January 25, 2023
0

Regina Trillo is the founder of Nemi Cactus Sticks, made with Mexican nopal. Photos: Nelipot Project, collage: Nina Roberts. Authentic...

TK

With A New Way to Make Furniture, Locally, Baru Has Nearly $1M In Revenue After Two Years

by Nina Roberts
December 23, 2022
0

Tino Go is the founder of Baru. Could “decentralized manufacturing” be the next industrial revolution? Tino Go, the founder of...

Vermont Farmer Creates A New Drink Category With Roots In The Past

Vermont Farmer Creates A New Drink Category With Roots In The Past

by Nina Roberts
November 23, 2022
0

Matt Sayre is the founder of Shrubbly, a sparkling shrub drink made with aronia berries. Photo collage: Nina Roberts The...

The Passion of The Christian Hip Hop Entrepreneur James Rosseau

The Passion of The Christian Hip Hop Entrepreneur: James Rosseau

by Lori Ioannou
November 10, 2022
0

James Rosseau of Holy Culture Radio, bringing Christian hop hop to the forefront. Since its beginnings in the 1980s, Christian...

a red triangle with the words System Hacked on it

Cybersecurity Best Practices for Small Businesses

by Elizabeth Macbride
October 20, 2022
0

There's a new and booming market for cyber protection and cyber insurance services for small businesses.  The market started to...

More Americans Are Embracing Entrepreneurship

More Americans Are Embracing Entrepreneurship

by Elizabeth Macbride
October 6, 2022
0

Evidence continues to build that Americans are re-embracing the idea of entrepreneurship as a career, path to wealth and a...

Subscribe to Times of E’s Free Weekly Newsletter

Learn about the emerging ecosystem of diverse founders

Popular

  • Trailblazer: An Audacious Denver Entrepreneur Recruited An Xbox Creator To Develop Her Gaming Vision

    Trailblazer: An Audacious Denver Entrepreneur Recruited An Xbox Creator To Develop Her Gaming Vision

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Modern Mexican Food Brands Give Old El Paso The Boot

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Top 20 U.S. University Entrepreneurship Competitions

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • With A New Way to Make Furniture, Locally, Baru Has Nearly $1M In Revenue After Two Years

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Venture Capital Returns Are More Skewed Than People Realize

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0

Recent

Venture Spotlight: Realist Ventures In Connecticut Focuses on Biotech, Healthcare

January 26, 2023
Modern Mexican Food Brands Give Old El Paso The Boot

Modern Mexican Food Brands Give Old El Paso The Boot

January 25, 2023
Editor’s Note: We Are All Jacinda Now

Editor’s Note: Burnout World; Dark Web’s Criminal Minds; Small Biz Gets Stuck w George Santos

January 23, 2023

Recommended

  • Health
  • Climate
  • Deep Tech
  • Finance
  • Education
  • Women Entrepreneurs
  • Mentorship
Carlinde Kallianiotis

5 Steps To Become A Visionary Woman Leader

3 years ago
Weekly Newsletter: Lessons from Plato, Labor’s Rise, and Pick the Right Social Media Platform

Weekly Newsletter: Lessons from Plato, Labor’s Rise, and Pick the Right Social Media Platform

10 months ago
  • About
  • Partner
  • Bespoke Research
  • Listening Tours​
  • Contact
  • Support Us
  • Privacy Policy

(703-966-7357)

© 2020 Mondial Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 
Facebook Twitter Linkedin
No Result
View All Result
  • Research
  • Finance
  • Women Entrepreneurs
  • New Builders
  • Ecosystem
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Editor’s Note

© 2022 Mondial Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Support Times of E

Times of E covers the emerging ecosystem of diverse founders.

With your support of our journalism, you will receive our weekly newsletter and one of these resources for free: 

Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?