Leaders of the Winter Park technology company Sighthound said that they expect the company to acquire several businesses this year while announcing the acquisition of a Boulder, Colo., smart cameras firm for an undisclosed amount.
The company has acquired Boulder AI, which has done work on smart cameras with several cities and government organizations, including Denver, Dallas and the Florida Department of Transportation.
The move also installs Boulder AI CEO Darren Odom as Sighthound’s chief technology officer.
“Together, our aim is to bring openness and programmability to (video management systems), long seen as closed, propietary and inflexible,” Sighthound CEO RJ Burnham said in a news release. “Our objective is to meet customers where they are, give them great technology that’s easy to deploy from a company with integrity and great support.”
Sighthound has in its suite of products license plate recognition software that recognizes, logs and matches license plate numbers with a database of vehicles.
The company counts more than 500 law enforcement agencies as customers.
With the Boulder acquisition, the company plans to create a way to turn any video stream into a network of sensors that can capture data for customers.
“Our goal is to make customers feel there is an alternative to the way things have been done in the past,” Odom said. “They can finally have a technology partner that gives them accurate data, served up in a single pane of glass to view quickly, without sacrificing latency – from license plate reading and vehicle make/model/color for Law Enforcement to pedestrian near-misses for Smart Cities to face-based recognition for touchless Access Control in Government buildings – if we can give them easy access to data instantly and make installations easier and more affordable, while increasing privacy, the customer wins and that’s what we want to see.”