One Sunnyvale company believes there is a better way to do security — and it is with artificial intelligence.
Sentry AI owner Uday Chaka said he got interested in security after a burglary at his home in 2019. A crook had hacked his garage lock, absconding with, among other things, a couple of his bikes. Then, the next night, they tried it again.
“How could someone come again and again, especially with so many cameras?” he said. “They were so brazen and not worried about getting caught.”
When Chaka spoke to the police, they told him unless they catch the thieves red-handed or have accurate real-time alerts, they are typically playing catch-up. As someone with a background in software engineering and an MBA from Duke, Chaka’s wheels began to turn.
The way he figured it, a clever designer could create AI to do some of the monitoring scut work and pull a person into the mix when it became necessary. He pitched his idea to one of the officers that investigated his case. He had his first investor. But it wouldn’t be his last.
The idea behind Sentry AI is that it behaves like a security guard. Through technology that monitors the property, the AI identifies anomalies. Since Sentry AI serves everything from residential complexes, auto dealerships and garages to places of worship to retail shops, what is peculiar varies based on the client’s specifications.
Each client sets parameters. A green alert simply means “pay attention,” while a yellow alert is something that violates internal policies, such as loitering or rifling through the garbage. Red alerts are crimes.
Once the AI has determined something is amiss, it again does what a security guard would do: it probes, putting the intruder on notice that they are being monitored. Then, if the situation escalates, a person that the AI has notified can intervene at any time, similarly communicating with the intruder.
“People need to know if you break the law, you will be caught,” Chaka said. “A criminal is always testing the defenses.”
Partnerships with security guard companies allow Sentry AI to dispatch a guard onsite within minutes, if needed. And because of the sophistication of the AI’s information gathering, those guards have up-to-date information, so they don’t walk into the situation blind.
Outsourcing the banality of monitoring allows Sentry AI to offer security for roughly 10% the cost of having a full-time security guard onsite. By creating what Chaka called “redundancies” — e.g., the different views of the same area — Sentry AI is able to gather pertinent information, such as license plate numbers.
Locally, the company helped police bust a mail theft ring at the Boulevard Condominiums early last month. And the company is growing. Chaka said Sentry AI, headquartered at 440 N. Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, already has a presence in Florida, Chicago and Michigan.
Pricing ranges from $500 to $1,000 a month, depending on whether 12-hour or 24-hour monitoring is desired. Upgrading security systems onsite to have AI capabilities has an upfront cost. For Boulevard Condominiums, Chaka said that the one-time cost was around $10,000.
For more information on Sentry AI, visit https://smartsentryai.com/
I was a victim of the Santa Clara mail theft ring and I am so grateful for SentryAI! And so impressed that I had their services added to my business office as well. Thank you Sentry and Santa Clara PD!