The $31 million bet that cameras should act
In October 2024 Spot AI launched the first Video AI Agents and closed a $31 million round with Qualcomm Ventures. What the chipmaker was actually buying.
Tag
Data Centers
Why the edge box is winning the argument over the cloud
The cloud was supposed to eat everything. For video agents it lost on arithmetic: a facility with 64 cameras produces 30 terabytes a month, and a lock has to fire in under a second.
How a large vision model gets onto a box next to a camera
The models that win benchmarks assume a data-center GPU. The box behind a loading-dock camera has a 15-watt budget. Distillation, quantisation, and pruning are how one becomes the other, and a latency budget decides what stays behind.
On-prem is the blocker
Whether the model runs in the building or in someone else's data center is now a procurement gate. In the sales calls it was raised by a meat plant, a clinic, a laundromat chain, an integrator in Nigeria and a telecom reading the EU AI Act.
The data center is built on camera, then run on it
A hyperscale site is a construction project for a year and a half, then a locked box for twenty. Cameras now measure the poured concrete, catch the missing hard hat, spot the loiterer at the fence and watch the cage door.
