Cash raised & new brass at AlertEnterprise & VideoIQ

More cash and new top brass were added by two suppliers in the past week.

This morning I was working on a story out of California, about a software company, AlertEnterprises, raising $19m and appointing a new high-profile board member, when I got a press release from VideoIQ about $7.5m in new funding and a new CEO.

There were whispers last week about VideoIQ—a venture-backed producer of IP cameras and encoders with on-board storage and built-in self-calibrating analytics based in Bedford, Mass.—getting a new CEO, and this morning the video surveillance company officially announced that Ed Bednarcik has replaced Scott Schnell as CEO.

Bednarcik is experienced in getting companies ready for IPOs,  according to a press release, Most recently, he led Write Line out of Worcester, Mass., which was sold to Eaton Corp. in August of 2010. The release says Bednarcik was “an early employee of A123 Systems” and notes that A123 “was the largest IPO on the NASDAQ in 2009.”

I spoke to former CEO Scott Schnell back in May about an integration VideoIQ did with Software House, and while I didn't write about it in the story, Schnell talked a lot about recent growth at PE-backed VideoIQ.

Here are some of my notes from that call: “VideoIQ tripled the run rate it had a year ago,” Schnell said. “Our largest customers a year ago had dozens of customers, our largest customers today have hundreds of cameras.” The company's “huge uptick in business” he said has been helpled along by the introduction of its HD, he said. The company is big in three verticals: critical infrastucture, education and corporations, notably in banking. Schnell also said that the company does 25 percent of its business outside of the U.S.

I have a call with Ed Bednarcik today and will have something for the newswire on Thursday.

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, in Fremont, Calif., AlertEnterprise, a software company designed for critical infrastructure, got a $19 million infusion from Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers. KPCB has invested in 3VR and iControl out in the Bay Area. KPCB managing partner,Ray Lane, is now on AlertEnterprises' board of directors. Lane is also the non-executive chairman of the board of HP.

AlertEnterprise's software combines PSIM-like capabilities with identity management and adds a third capability—industrial control systems. This third capability also helps the end user adhere to with government compliance standards, Pan Jamal of AlertEnterprise told me on Friday.

From the release: “AlertEnterprise delivers true prevention of theft, fraud and acts of terrorism against critical infrastructure by analyzing and instantly responding to risks from blended threats across IT Systems, Physical Access Control Systems and Industrial Control Systems.”

More about this in a story this week. I'll also be meeting Jasvir Gill, AlertEnterprise CEO at ASIS next week.