Mindful Multi Family Show #266 with Chris Salerno (A Surveillance Security Solution with Sheldon Bentley)

The Story of Cloudastructure: After the theft of a laptop from the office, Televoke CEO and founder Rick Bentley went to the landlord to get the surveillance footage, only to discover the cleaning lady had unplugged the surveillance cameras for the vacuum - no footage, and a thief got away scot free. Dubbing the moment “The Vacuum Effect”, Bentley had a vision for his next endeavor: moving surveillance footage to the cloud, so it would never be lost. Bentley and a team of engineers would go on to hip pocket research for more than a decade, during which time he sold Televoke to Uber for $50 million. But technology wouldn’t catch up to Rick’s vision until 2016, when large-scale computer vision became possible. Bentley realized with AI processing in the cloud, surveillance wouldn’t be just safely stored in the cloud: it could be analyzed there in mere seconds. A landlord wouldn’t be looking up who stole the laptop after the crime. He’d be getting an alert to the crime while the theft was in progress, and potentially, be able stop it. Rick promptly quit his job as an Advisor to Google, and went to work on Cloudastructure in earnest. In early 2021, he would go on to raise $35 million through crowdfunding and hire a sales team to take the Cloudastructure’s AI surveillance to market. To find a market fit, Rick and his team returned to the story of the stolen laptop: his vision had begun with surveillance cameras in a building. By hiring a sales team with decades of experience in property management, he could customize Cloudastructure’s technology to fit that market’s specific needs, and provide vital technology and service. The hire of Whitney Fraser and her team in multifamily proved that theory true. Whitney landed the first enterprise multifamily deal in 2022. And sure enough, they had a customization need: they wanted the footage monitored by remote guards. Cloudastructure’s engineers went on to build the first integrated Remote Guarding software in the industry, completing it in a record 11 months, and go on to win 8 Homeland Security Astor Awards for the feat and just this past month, they won the Proptech Breakthrough Award for Residential Data Management Platform of the Year 2023. Today, Cloudastructure is a vibrant part of Multifamily proptech, providing both AI Surveillance and Remote Guarding software and services to some of the biggest names in Multifamily Property Management.