Building the “See Something, Say Something” AI for Every Camera

**Shikhar Shrestha** (0:00)
An incident just doesn't happen spontaneously out of nowhere. There's always suspicious precursor behavior that's going on. The whole idea is to turn every kind of camera that you have deployed today into a see something, say something node, where it becomes smart, it sees the bad thing happening, and just tells you. And if it tells you, you can respond. It's a vision language model. So basically the model that takes an image and then uses a language model to understand everything that's happening in that image or a video itself. I was actually a victim of an armed robbery when I was 12 years old. Crazy incident was at the school bus stop with my mom. Guy walks up to me, puts a gun on my head. One of the memories I had from that was there was like this old school kind of closed circuit camera and I'm just staring at the camera and I'm just hoping that someone's watching and will come and help us. Nobody's watching and nobody helped us. Now what you can do with AI forensics is kind of build a whole trail of what actually happened during the incident for you and then extending that to also automated response. So almost like a real time assistant where it tells the operator, hey, I just saw a weapon brandish outside the building. First step I'll do is lock down the building. Second step I'll do is lock down the elevator. Third step I'll do is call law enforcement. A person jumps over the fence, goes inside, breaks into multiple of their buildings. They got an alert and within I think five minutes of them getting the alert, everybody, their entire security leadership is on site. The police department is on site and they actually ended up apprehending the perpetrator.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:29)
When Shikhar Shrestha was just 12 years old, a man put a gun to his head during a robbery. He stared at a nearby security camera hoping someone was watching. No one was. That moment led him to found Ambient, a company making every camera intelligent. But Shikhar's real vision? AI that doesn't just detect threats, but response to them in real time, automatically unlocking doors, calling the police, full agentic security. In this conversation, Shikhar sits down with a16z's Martin Casado to talk about building on hard mode and how the $100 billion security industry is about to transform.

**Martin Casado** (2:04)
Shikhar, it's great to have you.

**Shikhar Shrestha** (2:05)
Yeah, great to be here.

**Martin Casado** (2:06)
Shikhar is the CEO and founder of Ambient, has been doing physical security with AI even before this latest AI wave. And now that's all being disrupted. So we're here to talk about AI and physical security. So welcome.

**Shikhar Shrestha** (2:19)
Thank you.

**Martin Casado** (2:20)
Maybe just give a very quick background on the company, just very, very quick as far as what it does, and then the founding story.

**Shikhar Shrestha** (2:26)
Basically, as you said, we're bringing AI to physical security. The mission of the company really is to prevent physical security incidents from happening. And we target large enterprise as kind of our customer segment. So the idea is today when you go to these organizations, they have cameras, access control, all these different systems to prevent incidents, but it's very reactive, there's no intelligence.
And so they deploy ambient, we watch what's happening on the camera feeds in real time using AI. We analyze alarm events coming in, and then basically find out what's suspicious, help them respond to it in real time, so they can actually prevent incidents from happening in sort of the current status quo, which is reactive. And then the founding story, so I was actually a victim of an armed robbery when I was 12 years old. Yeah, crazy incident was at the school bus stop with my mom. Guy walks up to me, puts a gun on my head. My mom had a gold chain on, grabs the chain, and I think it lasted.

**Martin Casado** (3:25)
Wait, where was this?

**Shikhar Shrestha** (3:26)
This was back in India where I grew up.

**Martin Casado** (3:30)
I didn't know there were guns in India.

**Shikhar Shrestha** (3:31)
Yeah, it was like a home made or home grown kind of like a gun which can only fire like one bullet essentially.

**Martin Casado** (3:38)
Oh my God, that is crazy.

**Shikhar Shrestha** (3:40)
Yeah, yeah, and in the town we were like, yeah, they had access to those. Super scary and I think it lasted maybe like not more than 20, 30 seconds or so. It felt like it lasted forever. But one of the memories I had from that was there was like this old school kind of closed circuit camera hanging from the pharmacy near this bus stop pointed at us. I'm just staring at the camera and I'm just hoping that someone's watching and will come and help us. Nobody's watching and nobody helped us. But I just kind of grew up very paranoid. I always thought incidents can happen. And I was interested in building security systems and alarm systems and fast forward many years, started working in computer vision. And kind of late 2016, this is when the first sort of image captioning models were happening. Me and Vakesh were playing around with computer vision. We thought, wow, in the next five, ten years, it'll be probably better than a human in terms of understanding images and videos. And the first idea that came to my mind is, wow, if we deploy that on every camera and it just tells you if something bad is happening, we'll prevent incidents from happening. And that's kind of how we got started.