A startup which aims to protect people’s privacy amid the avalanche of video surveillance cameras has raised £5.6 million seed funding.
London-based Pimloc has developed visual AI, Secure Redact, which automatically blurs faces, heads and license plates in video – a process that previously required time and skilled human operators.
It can be accessed directly as an online SaaS product or via APIs and Containers to allow integration into local video workflows and systems.
Secure Redact is already in use by entities that must provide video evidence that complies with new data privacy regulations.
Low-cost camera systems, cheap data storage and retrieval, and increasingly useful vision-based AI have triggered exponential growth in video surveillance. There is now a CCTV camera for every 13 residents in London: from workplaces, hospitals, schools, transport networks and other public places to home security IoT solutions, body-worn cameras and vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems.
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Pimloc says the ‘video genie has escaped the bottle’. As the volume of personal and sensitive video data expands, so does the risk of cyber breaches.
“It will be used – but it will also be abused,” said CEO Simon Randall.
The seed round was led by Zetta Venture Partners. Existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Speedinvest also participated.
It will be used to scale the business across Europe and the US to match the spread of data legislation and evolution of public opinion.
Mark Gorenberg, MD at Zetta Venture Partners, added: “Large public- and private-sector entities have huge amounts of video data that they can’t use or share without running into privacy issues.
“Depending on where they’re operating, protecting personally identifiable information in video is either already a legal requirement or it inevitably will become a legal requirement. Pimloc’s solution already makes this practical.”
Randall adds: “We’re seeing companies around the world setting the bar for data privacy at GDPR compliance, even if they’re operating in areas where it’s not the law.”