Israeli tech startup Viisights bags $10M Series A for its real-time video intelligence platform

The video analytics market is projected to reach $3.9B next year and $14.4B by 2025, according to a report from research firm, Allied Market Research. To take advantage of this market, Viisights is a Tel Aviv, Israel-based tech startup developing artificial intelligence technologies that facilitates human-like video understanding, which in turn serves as basis for fully autonomous video intelligence systems powered by pattern prediction technology. Viisights is a developer of behavioral understanding systems for real-time video intelligence.

Today, Viisights announced it has closed $10M Series A funding to expand its sales organization, establish a global presence, continue to enhance its current products, and develop new solutions. The round was led by Canadian VC, Awz Ventures, with the participation of Firstime Ventures and additional existing investors.

Founded in 2015 by Amjad Akkawi, Asaf Birenzvieg, Menashe Rothschild, and Simon Polak, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based Viisights provides behavioral understanding systems for safe and smart cities, smart enterprises, critical infrastructures, transportation hubs and shared mobility initiatives. Viisights’ team is made up of serial entrepreneurs with proven track records in building and developing businesses that rely on innovative, state-of-the-art technologies.

Viisights’ technology is based on real-time temporal and holistic video streaming analysis. Viisights uses video clips rather than discrete images for training its core AI engine, which are based on convolutional neural networks and LSTM models. These unique structures are used to create a unique event signature that includes the scene’s participants and their extracted features, such as positioning, movement, size and relationship with other objects. During runtime streaming, these signatures are being searched for and compared.

“Awz is a believer in Viisights’ technology and management team,” remarked Yaron Ashkenazi, Founder & Managing Partner of Awz Ventures. “We view Viisights’ behavioural recognition solution as a unique offering within the video analytics market, which has great commercial potential and will make the world a safer place.”

Asaf Birenzvieg, Viisights CEO & Co-Founder, said: “We are excited to rollout our products globally; providing our customers with a safer, more secure, and resource efficient environment leading to a higher quality of life.”

Viisights harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to bring behavioural understanding to video surveillance and practically every video stream. Its flagship product, Viisights Wise, offers a wide range of applications, including: violence and weapon recognition, context-related suspicious activity recognition, crowd management, vehicle and traffic surveillance, indoor and outdoor safety (including fire and smoke detection), and resource optimization.

Viisights Wise uses Viisights’ proprietary video understanding technology to extract actions, events, and scenes from real-time video feeds. Object classification applications, which hold the majority of the video analytics market, have very limited functionality. Those legacy applications process a single image to recognize objects, their attributes, and limited data about the object’s movement. In contrast, Viisights Wise is capable of understanding complex dynamic situations. For example: people fighting, people acting suspiciously, or an automobile collision. These events cannot be detected via traditional object classification technology.