Pioneering the Video Surveillance Industry’s Movement to the Cloud: Our Investment in Eagle Eye Networks

Today, we get to welcome Dean Drako and his team at Eagle Eye Networks to the Accel Family! 

We’re particularly excited about working with Dean because we’ve experienced his charismatic and impactful leadership before. Our relationship has been years in the making and first began when our partner, Sameer, led the first investment in Dean’s previous multi-billion dollar security company, Barracuda Networks. The two bonded over a shared passion for creating startups (and cool cars) and continued to ideate over the years.

With an impressive entrepreneurship track record at a series of companies, Dean turned his focus to another security category that was in desperate need of innovation: video surveillance. Customers in this $46B market are still forced to select from ineffective, legacy, on-prem offerings. Dean saw an opportunity to fix this by moving video security to the cloud, and Eagle Eye Networks was born. 

Eagle Eye Networks’ AI and analytics-driven technology in the cloud is truly transformative. Previously, most pharmacies, restaurants, retailers, and other businesses used antiquated in-store surveillance systems. These on-prem deployments required people to monitor their systems while sitting in server rooms within their stores to see what’s happening on their cameras. They had no way of responding to an alert at any time of the day while away from their store. Dean recognized that intelligently analyzing security video footage at scale in the cloud was the way forward, and would enable security teams to access video footage and respond to events from anywhere, which has become increasingly important in a remote world.

Eagle Eye Networks is built on an open ecosystem approach to video surveillance. Their offering does not require customers to replace existing cameras that they have already invested in; rather, EEN works with a customer’s existing infrastructure. Their channel partners and camera vendors love this approach because they don’t lose business. We love this approach because everybody wins.

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses of all sizes around the world in need of a modern, effective video security solution, and we’re delighted to partner with Dean and the Eagle Eye team as they pioneer the video surveillance industry’s move to the cloud.

––Sameer Gandhi, Nate Niparko, and Jack Larson