Protent

Roadmap & Position in Public Safety Intelligence

Real-time AI threat detection in live surveillance for law enforcement and security.

Company Overview

Builds a real-time AI-powered video intelligence platform that uses deep learning, multimodal vision-language models, and reinforcement learning to detect and escalate threats in live surveillance feeds for law enforcement and large-scale security operations.

What They're Building

The company's public product roadmap & what they're committed to building.

Protent has publicly announced pilot deployments with police departments in Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, focusing on real-time threat detection in live video feeds. Their YC W26 Demo Day profile highlights proactive surveillance intelligence, natural language video querying, and early escalation pattern detection as core platform capabilities.

Latest Intelligence

Zeitgeist tracks private signals to determine where the company is heading strategically.

No Signals Yet

Founder and Key Execs

Srihan Balaji, Co-Founder & CEO

Co-Founder & CEO

Harisai Karthikeyan, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Abhisheik Sharma, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Founder Force Multiplier

Protent combines rare production experience deploying reinforcement learning for video intelligence in classified defense environments (Lockheed Martin) with advanced UC Berkeley systems research, giving them a unique ability to build ML models that work reliably on messy.

Funding History

2025 | Protent founded by Srihan Balaji, Harisai Karthikeyan, and Abhisheik Sharma.
2025 | $500K Seed round from 1 institutional investor.
2025-2026 | Pilot deployments with Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis police departments.
2026 | Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch.

Competitors

AI Video Analytics

Ambient.ai, Actuate AI, Vintra (real-time threat detection).

Traditional VMS/PSIM

Genetec, Milestone Systems, Avigilon (video management).

Computer Vision Platforms

Plainsight, Roboflow (general CV tooling).

Government/Defense AI

Palantir, Anduril (broader public safety AI).

Protent

's Moat:

Reinforcement learning for video intelligence deployed in classified defense environments (Lockheed Martin) represents training and operational data that civilian competitors have never accessed. Pilot deployments with Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis police departments create reference accounts in a procurement-cycle-driven market.

How They're Leveraging AI

Real-Time Video Threat Detection

Real-time detection of weapons, fights, and medical emergencies in live surveillance video feeds using deep learning object detection and activity recognition models.

Multimodal Vision-Language Search

Natural language querying of live and archived surveillance video using multimodal vision-language models, enabling operators to search footage by describing events in plain English.

Reinforcement Learning Alert Triage

Reinforcement learning-based alert prioritization system that dynamically ranks and filters threat detections to minimize false positives and surface the highest-risk incidents first for human review.

AI Use Overview:

Using real-time video threat detection with deep learning, multimodal vision-language search for investigations, and RL-based alert triage.

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