Solink raises more than $100 million USD to help physical stores keep an eye on their business

Ottawa-based surveillance tech company Solink has raised more than $100 million USD ($140 million CAD) in a new strategic investment round to solidify itself as a global leader in what it sees as an emerging industry: AI vision intelligence. 

The company announced the round, led by Toronto-based private equity firm Vertu Capital, on Thursday morning. In an interview, Solink CEO Michael Matta did not disclose how much Solink raised, but said it “may be a small rounding error” from the announced $100 million USD. 

“That’s really the focus of this investment: continuing to position around where we see the puck going.”

Michael Matta, Solink

The round consisted of a mix of primary and secondary capital. More than 90 percent of the proceeds are headed to Solink’s balance sheet, and the remainder are going through employee and investor stock sales. Existing investor Goldman Sachs reinvested in Solink through the new round, citing “strong customer adoption and an ambitious product vision,” while new investors Golub Growth and Comcast Ventures also participated. 

The new capital will help solidify Solink’s evolution from a cloud-connected surveillance platform for restaurants and retailers into a provider of AI-powered business intelligence for the physical world, Matta explained to BetaKit.

“The physical world is a lot more chaotic than the digital world,” Matta said. “Things don’t repeat in a certain cadence, and so that reasoning layer of being able to understand the physical world, and what the intent and context is, is really important today.” 

Essentially, Matta is saying that, while data gathering is easy for an online retailer, brick-and-mortar stores are comparatively helpless. Solink helps store security teams manage and keyword search their thousands of hours of footage, but Matta also sees potential in helping those businesses extract value from the other “99 percent” of unseen surveillance footage by using AI. This includes identifying store factors, like missing products or long lines, that resulted in missed sales. 

“You can go into hundreds of rabbit holes as to why we are not optimizing our physical space or the priorities that we have as a business,” Matta said. “Solink wants to be that sidekick to operators and to owners to be able to help them execute.” 

Surveillance tech backlash

Solink is equipping more retailers’ surveillance cameras with its AI-powered toolkit amidst a wave of public backlash surrounding surveillance technologies, from protests against Flock cameras to the outcry against surveillance tech in billboards and M&M vending machines. That tech is also lucrative; the global AI surveillance market is expected to grow from $4 billion USD to nearly $11 billion USD by 2032. When asked how public sentiment has affected Solink, Matta stressed that the company is running a “very different business.” He explained that Solink doesn’t install any of its own cameras, only bolstering cameras that are already recording a business’ premises, and does not provide biometric data. 

“The way I like to think of it is, it’s not the actor; [Solink is capturing] the actions that are happening, and being able to understand at scale what is taking place,” Matta said, adding that Solink’s tech is not identifying individuals. “It has less to do [with] us creating a viral product that’s selling anonymized information, or anything like that.” 

A Solink spokesperson later added that surveillance data is confined to the business owner, and that their data doesn’t get shared with anyone, not even police, unless there is a warrant and consent from the business owner. 

Data intelligence for the physical world

The last time Solink raised money was in 2023, when it secured $60 million USD in Series C funding to help take its surveillance software global. When the company expanded its Ottawa headquarters just over a year ago, Matta told BetaKit that Solink was not looking to raise any more capital, and that it still had “a lot of liquidity” from the 2023 financing.

This week, Matta said the new raise wasn’t driven by a need for liquidity; rather, Solink wants to invest in the shift from data intelligence being a strictly digital affair to a physical one. 

“Today, I believe we’re operating in a trillion-dollar TAM.”

Michael Matta, Solink

“I believe in the next two to three years we’re going to continue to see that level of AI and intelligence penetrate our physical world,” Matta said. “We just wanted to be the leaders in that space, and that’s really the focus of this investment: continuing to position around where we see the puck going.”

Solink has already experienced rapid growth in recent years. Matta did not provide specific revenue numbers, but said Solink has been “scaling revenue pretty aggressively,” increasing between 40 and 50 percent year after year. On Wednesday, Solink placed 10th on Deloitte’s 2026 Enterprise–Industry Leaders list, sporting a 241-percent revenue growth rate over the past four years. 

The company says its platform is in more than 35,000 customer locations (nearly double since 2023) and 500,000 cameras in 65 countries, ingesting more than 750 million hours of video every month. Its customers include stores like Gap, JYSK, Domino’s, Moose Knuckles, and Tim Hortons.

RELATED: Solink expands Ottawa headquarters as it targets 1,000 employees by 2030

To entrench its place in the market, Solink will use the new funding to execute on an AI roadmap, renew its go-to-market efforts, and explore “growth through strategic opportunities.” Solink’s AI roadmap includes an upcoming hardware launch that will provide a way for its customers to host its AI agents on premises, rather than run on an external data centre, Matta said. On the go-to-market side, an “important” reselling partnership with new investor Comcast also opens up an avenue for Solink to reach the US telecom giant’s restaurant and retailer partners. 

While the physical security and security guard industries are hundred-billion-dollar businesses on their own, Matta said he believes those industries will increasingly shift their spend away from people and towards technology in the coming years. And that’s just the security side. With Solink looking to provide store managers more value from their surveillance footage than just stopping ne’er-do-wells, Matta sees his company well positioned to be a “global business that just happens to be based in Canada.”

“We used to operate in a $70 billion TAM [total addressable market],” Matta said. “Today, I believe we’re operating in a trillion-dollar TAM.”

Feature image courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.