Last week, Michael Matta got to do what most CEOs only dream of: use an extra-large pair of scissors to cut a giant ribbon.
“It was hard for us to get together and collaborate in person without us kind of bumping over each other.”
Matta busted out the supersized cutter to celebrate Solink’s renovated headquarters in Ottawa’s west end. The expansion more than doubled the company’s physical footprint, and came as the company has seen growth in both customer count and revenue, consistently increasing by roughly 50 percent over the past four years, Matta told BetaKit.
The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered surveillance tech firm hosted local members of Parliament, media, and AI minister Evan Solomon for a product presentation and a brief tour of its offices to commemorate the expansion.
Solink’s employees outnumbered and surrounded the event’s audience, standing shoulder-to-shoulder around the lobby, up the stairs, and overlooking from the mezzanine. From behind a podium, Matta recounted how the company started with three people who were gifted a server room in the old Wesley Clover offices “just to do some interesting work.” As the company grew, so did its occupancy. With the latest expansion, Solink went from 14,000 sq. ft. to 31,000 sq. ft of space.
“We’re proud of our Canadian beginnings and have grown the team here to 400 employees,” Matta said, adding that the event is “a celebration of old ambition and a commitment to making Solink a global leader.”
Solink hadn’t “meaningfully” expanded since the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a “pretty crammed” office environment as the company added 200 employees over the past two years, Matta explained to BetaKit following the event.
“It was hard for us to get together and collaborate in person without us kind of bumping over each other,” Matta said. “So this is an opportunity for us to scale.”
He added that Solink wants to have over 1,000 employees in Ottawa, and around the world, by 2030.
On top of the additional mingling room, the expansion strengthened the logistics side of the business. Solink ships and installs a physical appliance with its AI surveillance platform to every customer, and the renovation has increased its output from a “couple hundred” units per month to potentially “several thousands” if necessary, Matta claimed.
Solink’s tech helps restaurants, retail stores, and other businesses get more out of their security cameras. Using AI, the camera-agnostic software can flag suspicious behaviour, track stock levels, measure how long customers are waiting in line, and even watch for employees using their cell phones. Solink says its tech is in 500,000 cameras across 35,000 locations in 60 countries, including its first customer, Tim Hortons.
Solink CTO Martin Soukup and vice-president of product Christopher Sisto explained at the product demonstration how cameras are typically a reactive device that forces an operator to manually sort through footage.
“Your cameras aren’t dumb, they’re just bored,” Sisto said.
RELATED: Video surveillance software startup Solink raises $23 million CAD Series B round
With Solink’s video-language model, an operator can sort through millions of hours of footage from multiple security cameras in seconds. Type in “red truck” in the search bar, or even a specific car model, and be provided with every example of such a vehicle passing by the place of business throughout the day.
Outside of security and loss-prevention, Solink’s offering can be used to maintain operational efficiency. One autoshop customer uses Solink to track whether it’s holding to its 15-minute oil change promise, while a warehouse can monitor if its employees are using personal protective equipment.
Businesses can also create AI agents that watch live video footage and execute functions when certain criteria are met. Sisto and Soukup demonstrated a “security guard” that could be programmed to look for suspicious behaviour, like unauthorized persons taking boxes from a loading dock. The program then “spoke” to the ne’er-do-wells in the test footage, calling out what clothes they’re wearing, warning that the police had been dispatched, and alerting the store manager via text message.
Following the product demonstration, when an audience member’s phone rang during Solomon’s speech congratulating Solink on the expansion, the AI Minister cracked, “Solink just monitored whoever’s on the phone.” When BetaKit asked Matta how Solink addresses security concerns with such surveillance abilities, he explained that customers own all their data and that there is an anonymization layer “when it’s non-safety [or] security related.”
“We’re not identifying individuals, there’s no biometric [data], there’s nothing specific that identifies it to a specific, unique person,” Matta said, adding that Solink is compliant with General Data Protection Regulations in the European Union and United Kingdom.
However, he thinks the biggest opportunity with surveillance capabilities like Solink’s is the ability to contextually “zoom in” and “zoom out” of data access. While a human security guard can “abuse” their unfettered access to footage, Matta said “machines don’t care,” and will forward something if it’s “risky” without infringing privacy.
“In a situation where safety is compromised, you actually want to remove all privacy and learn exactly what’s happening with this individual, but at all times, you don’t,” Matta said, before reinforcing that Solink does not identify individuals. “The police don’t need to know everything about everyone.”
Solink last raised a $60-million USD Series C round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Growth Equity business in 2023. Matta told BetaKit that Solink is not looking to raise any more capital, and that it still has “a lot of liquidity” from its last financing.
“We’re continuing to be good stewards of that capital,” Matta said. “So the focus right now is just on continuing to scale and grow.”
All images courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.