Press & News

Tel Aviv, Israel (Nov. 18^th, 2019) – Viisights, a developer of innovative behavioural understanding systems for real-time video intelligence, today announced a $10M Series-A fundraising round led by Canadian VC, Awz Ventures, with the participation of Firstime Ventures and additional existing investors.

Viisights will use the proceeds from the fundraising to expand its sales organization, establish a global presence, continue to enhance its current products, and develop new solutions. The company offers its products through a growing network of strategic relationships with system integrators and sales channel partnerships, as well as through its direct sales force. The company reports that technology giants, NEC and Motorola Solutions, are already part of said network.

Viisights has a unique offering within the video analytics market, which is projected to reach $3.9B next year and $14.4B by 2025 (Allied Market Research). Viisights leads the “behavioural recognition” product category as listed in Nvidia’s Metropolis partner program page. Last year, the company was recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in AI for Computer Vision.

“Awz is a believer in Viisights’ technology and management team,” remarked Yaron Ashkenazi, Founder & Managing Partner of Awz Ventures. “We view Viisights’ behavioural recognition solution as a unique offering within the video analytics market, which has great commercial potential and will make the world a safer place.”

Asaf Birenzvieg, Viisights CEO & Co-Founder, said: “we are excited to rollout our products globally; providing our customers with a safer, more secure, and resource efficient environment leading to a higher quality of life.”

Viisights harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to bring behavioural understanding to video surveillance and practically every video stream. Its flagship product, Viisights Wise, offers a wide range of applications, including: violence and weapon recognition, context-related suspicious activity recognition, crowd management, vehicle and traffic surveillance, indoor and outdoor safety (including fire and smoke detection), and resource optimization.

Viisights Wise uses Viisights’ proprietary video understanding technology to extract actions, events, and scenes from real-time video feeds. Object classification applications, which hold the majority of the video analytics market, have very limited functionality. Those legacy applications process a single image to recognize objects, their attributes, and limited data about the object’s movement. In contrast, Viisights Wise is capable of understanding complex dynamic situations. For example: people fighting, people acting suspiciously, or an automobile collision. These events cannot be detected via traditional object classification technology.

Viisights’ technology is based on real-time temporal and holistic video streaming analysis. Viisights uses video clips rather than discrete images for training its core AI engine, which are based on convolutional neural networks and LSTM models. These unique structures are used to create a unique event signature that includes the scene’s participants and their extracted features, such as positioning, movement, size and relationship with other objects. During runtime streaming, these signatures are being searched for and compared.

Viisights provides solutions for safe and smart cities, enterprises, campuses, banking and financial institutions, critical infrastructure sites, transportation hubs, and security guard companies. The company has recently demonstrated a new product prototype for in-vehicle occupants monitoring that is designed for use in public transportation, autonomous and ride share vehicles .

While the video analytics market receives criticism due to concerns about privacy violation, and cities like San-Francisco and Oakland have banned facial recognition technology, Viisights has no such problem since it does not recognize specific individuals, but rather behavioural patterns of interest.

About Viisights

Viisights is a leading provider of behavioural understanding systems for real-time video intelligence that leverage unique artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The company provides behavioural understanding systems for safe and smart cities, smart enterprises, banking and financial institutes critical infrastructure sites, transportation hubs, and ride sharing vehicles.

Viisights is committed to developing AI technologies that facilitate human-like video understanding, which in turn serves as the basis for fully autonomous video intelligence systems powered by pattern prediction technology. To achieve success, the company relies on its seasoned management, a knowledgeable technology team, cutting-edge technological expertise, and a far-reaching vision.

www.viisights.com.

About Awz Ventures

Established in 2016 by Managing Partner, Yaron Ashkenazi, Awz is a Canadian hub for investment in cyber security, intelligence and physical security AI-based technologies from Israel, a global leader in these sectors. Awz manages $100M between its first two venture capital funds, having made early stage investments in 14 companies to date. 

Alongside Mr. Ashkenazi, Awz is led by Advisory Committee President, the Rt. Hon. Stephen J. Harper, the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada, and Founder & Board Chair, Mr. Ed Sonshine. Awz management and advisors also include former senior executives from Israeli and Canadian agencies (Mossad, ISA, CSIS, CAF), and global business experts.

www.awzventures.com

viisights announcement in the news:
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Photo credit: Ravit Turkiya‎