Startup Spot AI Inc. has raised $31 million in fresh funding to help companies analyze footage from security cameras at their facilities.

The investment, which was announced today, included contributions from more than a half-dozen investors. Qualcomm Ventures was among the participants. The cash infusion brings the company’s total outside funding to $93 million.

Spot AI sells a hardware appliance called the Intelligent Video Recorder, or IVP, that runs on an Nvidia Corp. graphics card. It can connect to the security cameras at a facility such as a factory and automatically store footage in onboard storage drives. According to Spot AI, IVR holds onto videos for up to 90 days and can keep a backup copy in the cloud to protect against data loss.

The appliance optionally comes with cameras. Spot AI offers a half-dozen models capable of capturing footage indoors, outdoors and at nighttime. Some of the cameras can also rotate their lens toward a point of interest and zoom in.

According to Spot AI, its IVR appliance includes software that automatically detects when a camera malfunctions. There are also artificial intelligence models that help users more easily review the collected footage. 

Searching a video archive for specific events, such as a collision between two forklifts in a warehouse, can take a significant amount of time. The user has to identify the location where an event of interest took place, when it happened and the camera that captured it. Spot AI says its AI algorithms speed up the task by enabling users to search for clips with natural language prompts instead of manually sifting through footage.

The software also promises to save time in other ways. According to Spot AI, users can highlight an object or a location within a video and configure its platform to automatically detect relevant events. A plant manager, for example, could highlight a section of the factory floor where forklifts may not be used and have Spot AI detect when the rule is breached.

Against the backdrop of today’s funding announcement, Spot AI expanded its lineup of automation features with a capability called Video AI Agents. It allows the company’s platform to not only spot events of interest but also automatically take a user-defined action in response.

A manufacturer could use Video AI Agents to detect when a robotic arm malfunctions and automatically shut it down. Construction companies, meanwhile, can configure the platform to spot when workers enter a building without hard hats and activate an alarm. The feature also lends itself to various other tasks, such as generating daily reports about the number of vehicles that enter a car wash.

Spot AI’s platform is used by 1,000 customers across 17 industries. The company claims to have processed billions of hours of footage for those customers since launching in 2020.

Image: Spot AI