In 2017, Filip Kaliszan pulled an all-nighter at the Beverly Hills Equinox.
A luxury gym isn’t the obvious place to work through the night, but for Kaliszan, it was a serious opportunity. Just 15 months earlier, Kaliszan had cofounded physical security tech startup Verkada, and now Equinox, the prominent fitness chain, was giving him and his startup a shot. Equinox had agreed to install some of Verkada’s still-very-new cameras in one of its most high-profile locations. At the time, Kaliszan was still personally doing installations with early employee Raj Misra. So, when Equinox called, the two flew to Los Angeles from San Francisco, cloud-enabled cameras in hand. Kaliszan, a two-time entrepreneur and photography enthusiast, showed me photos he took that (long) night.
“I was looking back at these photos, and it reminded me that they told us, ‘you have from 11:30 PM until 4 AM, that’s when the gym is closed,’” said Kaliszan. “So we flew in at nine, got there at 11. We brought boxes of gear, climbed ladders, set up through the night—then flew out at 4.”
For Kaliszan, this night marked the beginning of Verkada’s relationship with its first major customer (and, he reckons, it may have also been his first time on a scissor lift). Today, Verkada cameras are across dozens of Equinox locations.
Today, those cameras that Kaliszan installed back in 2017 are still right where he left them, but the company has grown massively. Verkada has raised a $200 million Series E, valuing the company at $4.5 billion, Fortune can exclusively report. It’s a $1 billion valuation bump in a round led by General Catalyst with substantial involvement from Eclipse Ventures. Sequoia, Meritech, Michael Dell’s MSD, First Round Capital, and Felicis are among participating investors. This brings the company’s total funding so far to $700 million.
Verkada’s bull case is this: that large enterprise customers want the same ease-of-use that comes with a consumer’s Ring or Nest camera, and that security operations should be linked to the cloud, creating a unified operating system instead of a disjointed collection of basement hard drives. Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse Ventures partner, found Verkada’s operating system potential persuasive.
“Once Verkada lands one product with a buyer—typically AI security cameras, the same buyer is likely to expand to a second Verkada product (access control) and a third (emergency alerting, etc.), to get the full benefit of Verkada's platform,” said Madigan-Curtis via email. “In an increasingly unsafe world, these product categories are growing exponentially.”
In short, most of Verkada’s customers (a diverse group that includes luxury retailer Harry Rosen, the Salvation Army, and the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams) start like Equinox—one location, try it out, and buy more over time. The company—which just crossed 30,000 total customers—currently has 91 customers in the Fortune 500, and more than 4,700 large customers, up 43% year over year. (Verkada defines a large customer as spending $100,000 or more.)
Kaliszan said he’s not trying to reinvent the wheel on the OS strategy, so much as learn from the best.
"What Apple did really well was that when they released their phone, they focused on three things,” said Kaliszan. “It was a good phone, a good email client, and a good web browser. It didn't have the App Store yet. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles, like the camera, yet. But the few things it did, it did really well. And every year, they’ve chiseled away to make it better and better. Twenty years later, it’s scary to compete with.”
The company’s range of products has been growing steadily in recent years, and now includes alarms, workplace management, environmental sensors, and intercoms. Verkada and Eclipse both told me that they estimate the market the company’s chasing is around $60 billion.
Verkada sits at a dizzyingly varied set of use cases—from helping retailers stop fraudulent returns to stopping vaping in schools (thousands of schools use Verkada) and, of course, serious security issues. The company says it approaches privacy concerns through the lens of accountability and clarity.
“We give people appropriate warnings about things that are off, and when they turn on,” said Kaliszan. “We educate them about what it is, what it does, and how it works.” In the Equinox, he showed me a demo: “For example, the really simple features you're noticing here are these bubbles, these are all the people who are viewing this camera right now. Small touches like that make everyone so much more accountable.”
A few weeks ago, Kaliszan came down to Los Angeles and we walked through the Beverly Hills Equinox, where he’d put up more than a dozen of those early cameras (they look a little bit like R2D2’s head). It was Kaliszan’s first time back since that night eight years before, when his company was still new. We met the Equinox security manager who manages dozens of locations for the luxe fitness chain, and he scrolled through his Verkada app with us. Though Verkada’s camera products have evolved since that Equinox all-nighter years ago, Kaliszan is awed and relieved by the manager's enthusiasm.
“He’s using eight-year-old Verkada products and he’s saying it’s awesome,” said Kaliszan. “For me, the product-builder, I love this. The fact that it’s something he uses every day, and he still loves it, that’s the best. This was something we conceived out of nothing in my living room—and it still works.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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