Conntour raises $7M from General Catalyst, YC to build AI-powered search engine for security video systems

Today the surveillance technology industry is in the spotlight, but not for the best reasons. With controversy over US Immigration and Customs Enforcement exploiting the Flock camera network to monitor people, and criticism of home camera maker Ring for building new features that would enable law enforcement to ask homeowners for footage of their neighborhoods, there is currently a wide debate over safety, privacy, and who can watch who.

But controversy doesn’t erase markets, and the continued improvement of vision language models has only put more wind into the sails of companies working to build new ways to help companies monitor what’s going on in their buildings.

According to Matan Goldner, co-founder and CEO of video surveillance startup Conntour, ethics around the topic are important enough that he says his company is quite selective about the clients it sells to. This may not make business sense for a startup barely two years old, but Goldner says he can afford to do so because Contour already has several large government and publicly listed clients, one of which is Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau.

“The fact that we have such large clients allows us to select them and stay under control […] We really do control who uses it, what the use case is, and we can choose what we think is ethical, and of course legal. We use all of our judgment, and make decisions based on specific clients that we consider to be okay [to work with] “Because we know how they’re going to use it,” Goldner told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.

This traction has helped Contour do more than just be selective. Investors noted that the startup recently raised a $7 million seed funding round from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Liquid 2 Ventures.

The tour closed within 72 hours, Goldner said. “I think I scheduled about 90 meetings in about eight days, and after just three days — we started on Monday and by Wednesday afternoon, we were done,” he said.

Regardless, Contour may be right in his choice, especially considering how powerful AI tools are in this area. The company’s video platform uses AI models to allow security personnel to query camera feeds using natural language to find any object, person or situation in the footage, in real-time — a Google-like search engine designed specifically for security video feeds. It can also monitor and detect threats on its own based on pre-defined rules, and surface alerts automatically.

Unlike legacy systems that rely on pre-defined definitions or parameters to detect specific objects, movement patterns, or behaviors, Contour claims that its system uses natural language and vision models, giving it a high degree of flexibility and ease of use. A user might ask: “Find instances of a person wearing sneakers passing a bag in the hallway,” and the Conntour system will quickly search through all recorded footage or live video feeds to return relevant results.