Vehicles that pull into the driveway at Knightscope Inc.’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California, often come to a dead stop. That’s because a robot, which looks something like R2-D2 of “Star Wars” fame, is positioned squarely at the entrance. Soon, the robot rolls quietly aside after a brief time assessing who is visiting the building. Once again, the security guard has done its job.

Knightscope is in the security business, manufacturing autonomous robots to guard a variety of environments, from wind farms and parking lots to shopping malls and storefronts. Since its founding in 2013, the company has been steadily expanding its customer base and refining a technology that includes data gathering, live streaming, artificial intelligence and a multi-sensor platform.

The motivation for starting a company like Knightscope was grounded in basic math. There are currently only 2 million guards and police officers to secure more than 300 million U.S. citizens in all 50 states, according to William Santana Li (pictured, left), chairman and chief executive officer at Knightscope.

“I don’t care what math you’re going to come up with, it doesn’t work,” Li said. “I’m sick and tired of waking up every morning and looking on my news feed to find some horrific thing that’s happened again. You need something that’s going to be a game changer, and this is that game changer.”

Li spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at Knightscope’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Mercedes Soria (pictured, center), vice president of software engineering at Knightscope, also spoke with Frick in a separate interview at the company’s headquarters. They discussed how the company overcame initial skepticism, a transformation of the human security guard model, “machines as a service,” successful use cases, and future plans to enhance the technology.

The robotics business has endured its share of skepticism over the years, and Knightscope was no exception. When Li was seeking to raise capital, the comments ranged from “Bill, you’re out of your mind” to “Security is not an investment thesis,” Li recalled.

Watch the complete video interview with William Li below:

Closed successful new funding round

Five years later, the company just closed $25 million in new funding from Bright Success Capital, Konica Minolta Inc. and 5,000 crowdsourced investors. Microsoft and Juniper Networks Inc. are customers, and the company has contracts spread across 14 states.

“Like most good entrepreneurs, we ignored everyone and just did what we said we were going to go do,” Li said.

What Knightscope set out to do was transform the security industry by creating intelligent robots that could perform many of the same tasks that human guards were handling. It was a market ripe for disruption, because the national annual turnover rate for private security firms was more than 100 percent, with some estimates going as high as 400 percent.

“The reason [robots] are more effective can be summarized in one point: Security guards don’t like to do their jobs,” explained Soria, who previously appeared in an interview on theCUBE . “It’s a job that’s very monotonous, very boring.”

Watch the complete video interview with Mercedes Soria below:

Robot security as complete service

Knightscope’s alternative is a business model that offers “machines as a service” for companies seeking to lower crime and protect people and property. For a one-year contract, customers receive a robot equipped for nearly any environment. The offering includes data transfer, data storage, analysis, user interface, hardware and software upgrades, and maintenance and service.

“It’s one throat to choke; we’re responsible,” said Li, who emphasized that the goal was to free up security personnel so they would have the freedom to do more critical tasks. “We need to be able to empower them, not add more workload to them.”

Watch the video below for a glimpse of the K3 Knightscope robot in action:

While the machine-driven service model sounds attractive, Knightscope depends on results, specific use cases where a tough situation improved. It’s analogous to a high-crime area where police departments will park a law enforcement vehicle in a visible place to ward off potential problems.

“There’s people that had lots of crime, and just by the machine being there, they [now] have nothing; they’ve got zero,” Soria said.

Catching crooks in the act

Knightscope’s robots are equipped with cameras that can detect anything out of the ordinary during the day or night, with images either livestreamed to a security operations center or stored for later review. This has also resulted in not just preventing crime, but catching some crooks in the act, such as when one thief suddenly showed up to steal a car.

“We captured it all on video … gave the evidence to law enforcement, and the guy was caught before he crossed the state line,” Li said.

Knightscope has plans to add to its existing lineup of robotic sentries and enhance technology features. The company offered a peek for the media last fall of its K7 model, a multi-terrain autonomous vehicle, and hopes to get it out and patrolling soon.

With more than five years of training data, Knightscope has been fine-tuning its machine learning algorithms, which can already perform people and license plate recognition with a high degree of accuracy. The next application will hopefully be actual prediction of crime through deep analysis of ingested data and a multitude of situations.

The other major push will be for concealed weapons detection, a capability for the robots that is apparently in high demand. “That has been requested by a lot of our customers,” Soria said.

When Knightscope deployed its first robot in May 2015, Li was worried about the reaction. Would people become angry, perhaps take out a baseball bat and inflict serious damage to the machine?

“What ended up happening was a massive amount of robot selfies,” said Li, who felt that the moment represented an important step forward in the acceptance of robots to combat crime. “I’ve got a team of very dedicated engineers and patriots here working on trying to actually fix the problem, and we have the honor and privilege to do that every single day here in Silicon Valley.”

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Knightscope’s evolving technology.

Photo: SiliconANGLE