Most security cameras are useful only after something has gone wrong. Coram AI wants to change that.
The Bay Area startup has raised $35 million in Series B funding to expand its AI-powered physical security platform, bringing its total capital raised to $66 million. The round was co-led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures, with participation from UP.Partners, 8VC, and Mosaic Ventures. The company declined to share its valuation.
Founded in 2022, Coram helps organizations use the security equipment they already have. It connects cameras, badge readers, visitor logs, and emergency systems, and uses AI to help security teams find incidents and respond faster.
Coram is one example of a startup riding the boom in physical AI, a category built around bringing AI into systems that act in the real world. Venture capital investment in global robotics and physical AI has grown from around $4 billion in 2019 to $26 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook data. So far this year, companies in the space have raised more than $23 billion.
Coram was cofounded by Ashesh Jain, who previously led autonomy at Lyft’s self-driving division and worked as an engineering leader at Zoox, and Peter Ondruska, who led AI research at Lyft and Toyota’s Woven division after Toyota acquired Lyft’s self-driving technology in 2021.
After spending years building AI systems for autonomous vehicles, Jain and Ondruska figured they could apply their expertise to an even bigger market: physical security.
“Our earlier mission was to protect every public road, and now it is to protect every physical space,” Jain, Coram’s CEO, told Business Insider.
Coram is competing in a crowded security market that has also drawn scrutiny. Verkada, valued at $5.8 billion, suffered a major breach in 2021 when hackers accessed more than 150,000 live customer cameras, including inside hospitals and schools. Other competitors include Motorola Solutions’ Avigilon and Eagle Eye Networks.
Jain said Coram is racing to meet customer demand. Since raising its $13.8 million Series A last year, Jain said the company’s revenue has grown fourfold, and its customer base has tripled. The startup will use the new funds to expand its sales team and invest in product development.
More than 1,500 sites across the US and Canada use Coram, Jain said, including Hershey’s Ice Cream, Lakepointe Church, which has eight campuses in Dallas, and the junk removal company 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.
The startup has found particular traction with school districts. Jain said Coram can detect a firearm, automatically alert 911, and help trigger a campus lockdown.
The company is also rolling out a new product called Deep Investigation. The tool lets customers ask questions of the security platform and can be accessed through tools like ChatGPT or Claude
For example, Jain said a school could ask Coram to find every fight on campus over the past month, identify patterns, pull clips with student faces blurred, and generate a report. A warehouse customer could ask how long trucks are parked at loading docks or when a facility is busiest.
Jain said the goal is to give customers the equivalent of a sophisticated data science team, answering in minutes questions that would otherwise require more staff and hours of manual review.
Coram impressed some investors by showing off its technology during the fundraising process.
When UP.Partners’ Ally Warson, an investor in the latest round, visited Coram’s Sunnyvale office, the startup had its software running on the security cameras as her team walked in. Jain then invited Warson to ask the software questions in any language.
“I told the product in French to pull up all the people who had entered the office that morning wearing white shoes with a blue stripe,” Warson said. “And we watched it translate the French into English, and pull up photos of us entering the office.”
Coram’s ambition is to become one of the largest security providers in the world. Jain envisions a future in which Coram’s software works with robot dogs and potentially humanoids to help protect properties.
“Every building will have robotic security,” Jain said. “That is a part of our mission.”
