Conntour raises $7M from General Catalyst, YC to build an AI search engine for security video systems | TechCrunch

The surveillance tech industry today is in the spotlight, but not for the best reasons. With controversy around the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tapping into Flock’s camera network to surveil people, and home camera maker Ring drawing criticism for building new features that would enable law enforcement to ask homeowners for footage of their neighborhoods, there’s currently a broad debate around safety, privacy, and who gets to watch whom. But controversy doesn’t erase markets, and the continued improvement of vision-language models has only blown more wind in the sails of companies building new ways to help companies monitor what goes on in their premises. According to Matan Goldner, co-founder and CEO of video surveillance startup Conntour, the ethics around this topic are important enough that he says his company is quite picky about which clients to sell to. That may not come off as sound business sense for a startup barely two years in, but Goldner says he can afford to do this because Conntour already has several large government and publicly-listed customers, one of which is Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau. “The fact that we have such big customers allows us to select them and to stay in control […] We’re really in control of who is using it, what is the use case, and we can select what we think is moral and, of course, legal. We use all our judgment, and we make decisions based on specific customers that we’re okay [to work with] because we know ho...