The Future of Risked Based Security and What’s Ahead For Evolv
This month marks our fifth-year anniversary as a company and the celebration of more than one million people screened with our Evolv Edge physical threat detection technology. We spent three years developing cutting edge technology, more than a year in the field working with users and government testing labs and have been actively screening visitors for just over a year. These milestones are both motivating and critical for our company as we fulfill a vision of a world where safety and security can be possible in all the places we expect to visit safely. Our vision for the industry has no boundaries and is a promise to put safety first at a time when the threat landscape is ever changing. The time to act is now and we are doing so by re-thinking technology that hasn’t been touched or advanced for decades.
When we started Evolv in 2013, Anil Chitkara, my co-founder and our company’s president, and I set out on a mission to preserve everyone’s fundamental right to be safe in all the places people gather. We engaged with industry contacts in different markets to uncover unique pain points, meeting with professors and PhD students to learn about the latest technologies being applied in a diverse range of industries, and exploring security issues with U.S. and international security and counter terrorism experts. We saw a need to rally our networks around the common cause of addressing urgent and evolving security gaps that threaten this fundamental right to safety.
On the heels of these milestones, we’d like to take this opportunity to share with you what we’ve been up to and what’s on the horizon for our company.
Today: Customer Experiences are Pushing Us Forward
Since our founding in 2013, we’ve expanded to 45 employees and have solidified several installations and engagements that have been instrumental to informing the continued evolution of our products. In addition to having scanned more than 1 million people, we completed pilots at 30 different customer locations in 2017, have sales distributors with demonstration units in 14 countries across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and have been tested at five different government labs.
Because of the nature of our business, we can’t always describe our customers’ specific deployments. A few highlights that we can publicly discuss include installations at Oakland International Airport (OAK) and The Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, along with installations at a number of venues in New York City, the most targeted city for terrorism outside of war zones. The Evolv Edge® was purpose-built to help proactively keep people and assets safe by detecting and preventing threats before they happen. For these use cases, Evolv Edge offers proactive protection against current and emerging threats, speeding the security process and reducing lines.
OAK is a great example of the Edge used for employee screening for metallic and non-metallic threats at the pace of life.
In the case of performing arts centers, Evolv’s suite of products are being applied as part of an overarching risk-based security approach. Edge and Pinpoint, our integrated face recognition technology, screen well known and unknown patrons at the entrances to individual theaters, while Pinpoint can be deployed backstage to properly clear known, employed individuals and their guests. This approach makes securing venues a seamless process for a security team, while ensuring visitors have the positive and safe experience they expect when going to see a show or performance.
As these different examples illustrate, “one size fits all” doesn’t work for physical security today. Evolv is laser-focused on helping organizations embrace a risk management strategy that recognizes lower risk, pre-screened or “known” audiences and enables them to pass quickly and unobtrusively into a venue so security can focus their most rigorous screening on the few unknown visitors. For us, embracing technology that takes the friction out of the physical screening process is as much about the guest experience as it is about improving the physical security posture for our customers.
Tomorrow: Evolving Security for the New-World Paradigm
Ultimately, there’s a need for security that didn’t exist a few years ago and yesterday’s tools were not designed to address new threats. The same handheld or walk-through metal detectors and X-ray imaging systems that were deployed more than 50 years ago are still the primary screening solution used today. Combining the power of AI, more specifically machine learning, with smarter sensors and human IQ provides a more intelligent, informed solution. As we look to the future and the need to be more nimble than our adversaries, we’ll see sensors, deep learning and biometrics increasingly leveraged to seamlessly detect threats while making it easier for the general public to “just walk through,” giving guards and security professionals the information they need to quickly and confidently assure a safe environment for their visitors.
Throughout our journey, we’ve had the benefit of a tremendous support network, including our investors, advisors, employees and, most importantly, our customers. We remain grateful for the guidance and never-ending energy from all our stakeholders. We hope to make a difference in this world, and our ever-expanding team is critically important to making that happen. We hope you’ll continue to join us on our journey, as we work to scan millions more and enable safety anywhere, at the pace of life.
Want to be a part of our journey? Check out our open positions.