Mesa AI surveillance company goes global

Mar. 10—Iveda Solutions, a Mesa artificial intelligence video surveillance company, started in a 250-square-foot office at Alma School Road and Southern Avenue in 2003 with a couple employees.

Today, its shares are traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange and it has ambitions to become a billion-dollar company leading the charge toward "smart cities."

CEO David Ly said that despite being wooed by other Valley communities to relocate over its 20 years of growth, Iveda has "stayed loyal" to Mesa.

So Mesa remains the company's base as it plots a major expansion, hiring engineers and signing contracts to deploy products across the globe, with clients in Taiwan and Latin America among its most recent new customers.

Iveda hopes to ride a rising wave of interest in artificial intelligence and solve problems in law enforcement, health care, city management and business.

Ly said when he was starting out in 2003, the company was bringing surveillance systems into the 21st century by upgrading them from VHS tape recorders to cameras linked to networks and cloud storage.

Suddenly, businesses could monitor their properties from anywhere in the world and keep footage longer. Twenty years ago, this was cutting edge.

Ly was well-versed in the latest technology because he worked for a San Jose-based wireless company before starting Iveda.

He was successful as a sales manager and relocated to Phoenix to take a leadership role.

But soon after he arrived, Ly said, the parent company started layoffs, which eventually included his job.

A natural choice might have been to move back to tech-heavy San Jose, but Ly saw opportunity in Arizona.

"I made the decision that, 'You know what? This is new,'" Ly said of the state. "The opportunity for us to build technology here. It was just pure excitement and enthusiasm for actually starting over."

As the technology for analyzing and utilizing video footage evolved, Iveda has kept pace with developments right into the AI age.

Many Iveda products use smart technology, allowing a police body camera to not just record a scene, but actively help an officer spot things in real time.

AI can also automatically analyze footage from hundreds of cameras, like those at Mesa's Real Time Crime Center, so a handful of humans can monitor a vast network of cameras.

Algorithms can detect weapons or abnormal behavior in the footage and alert a human.

In January, Iveda signed a deal with a city in Taiwan to deploy its Utilis Smart Poles.

Utilis Poles are light street lights on steroids. Besides a light, the poles have video, environmental sensors, wireless antennas and even a drone charging station.

According to the company, deploying the poles throughout the Taiwanese city will help it "solve a myriad of urban challenges, from improving parking and traffic management and charging electric vehicles, to detecting and notifying officials about street flooding."

Ly believes that making existing cameras and other hardware like street lights smarter has enormous growth potential.

"Think about the world — how many cameras are in existence today?" Ly said. "Iveda has built technology that in less than two seconds can enable any of those functional cameras ... to gain intelligence to help us detect, alert and provide more efficiency throughout our operations, whether we're a 7-Eleven, a laundry mat or an international airport."

Ly said he sees artificial intelligence as the "next wave" in the tech industry.

"In the next five to 10 years, it's all about AI and automation," Ly predicted.

"Like you and I were jumping on the iPhone wave of cloud from 2008 to 2014 ... when every company put 'cloud' in front or behind their name and became something special. Well today, if you put AI within your company name, you can tag along the bandwagon of AI."

Ly says Iveda is not a newcomer to the technology and believes it is in a good position to bring AI into real-world applications.

Mesa has made headlines by luring Fortune 500 companies to the city, but an even higher distinction for a community may be nurturing small businesses into giant status, which Iveda hopes to attain.

Iveda is one of several Mesa-born companies that has seen success, like Auer Precision, Edupoint, Atlis Motors and Backyard Taco, to name a few.

Ly said a factor in staying in Mesa was that one of the company's first customers and investors was Mesa businessman Joe Farnsworth of the real estate and home-building Farnsworth family.

Farnsworth was not a tech guy, but Iveda's technology intrigued him after it helped solve burglary issues at properties he managed in 2003.

"I hired David to come out and use the old technology," Farnsworth said. "When that happened, we caught the thieves and kind of shut down the guys that had been hitting us at our RV parks."

The power of the cloud cameras appealed to Farnsworth, as well as the entrepreneur behind them, and he decided to become an angel investor.

"I could tell (David) was just a young, hardworking hustler, and I mean that in a good way," Farnsworth said.

Farnsworth, who currently serves on Iveda's board, also brought international business experience to the company, having opened a real estate office in Taiwan in the 1990s that brokered millions in transactions.

After 20 years backing Iveda, the technology continues to impress Farnsworth.

"As I sit and listen, I'm astonished at what we can do," he said.

Farnsworth appreciates the good the technology can do in protecting people and property, but he also worries about abuse of surveillance technology.

Bad actors in authoritarian governments could use technology to track political dissidents, for example.

Iveda's AI Video Search technology has been certified by the Department of Homeland Security as Qualified Anti-Terrorism Technology, which grants the company liability protection under the SAFETY Act.

"Given the higher intelligence of the technology, there is a two way street: The technology will help you monitor any misuse," Ly said. "The technology will tattletale on you."

Ly said that one of the hardest calls he had to make as CEO is whether to take the company public or not.

Being a publicly traded company is "a double-edged sword."

It opens Iveda up to millions of new investors, which helps generate capital to grow, but that comes with new obligations and makes the company answerable to a broader audience.

"The choice was, let's do this. You want to be global? Do it right," Ly said.