Eyewitness Surveillance secures $15 million

HANOVER, Md.—Eyewitness Surveillance, a provider and installer of video monitoring solutions for auto dealerships and metal recyclers, has received $15 million in new financing from The PrivateBank.  

Rush McCloy, Eyewitness CEO told Security Systems News that the funding will be used to “build out into new markets, hiring [sales and customer support] people, product development and enhancement.”

Eyewitness Surveillance has revenue north of $5 million, has attrition of less than 5 percent and is growing at 30 percent annually, McCloy said. It has more than 230 customer locations, he said.

The company has 60 employees. Its headquarters are here, but it has employees in the Midwest, Texas and the Northeast as well.

In business for 13 years, the company was taken public by a consortium of investors who backed the management team. The largest shareholder is Peterson Partners.

Eyewitness installs, services, maintains and supports video monitoring systems for its customers. Most of its customers opt for a “zero down model,” McCloy said. It does not install other security systems components. Eyewitness uses a variety of cameras, UDT, Avigilon and several different thermal camera providers in its solutions. It can work with legacy cameras, he said.

The key to Eyewitness's solution are the “analytics” its system uses, which provide security and business intelligence to customers, McCloy said.

The analytics come from a variety of sources. “We use our own analytics, license or bring in others, which ever will work best for the situation,” McCloy said. “We are not married to any one math, we are married to the solution,” he added.

Eyewitness' software developers have developed some add-on products that enable its customers to “drive more value out of their systems,” McCloy said, including its Sales Direct, a video analytic product that enables car dealerships to quickly verify and counter false claims. Its Service Lane Kit 2.0 product helps car dealers “count and track down sales leads.”

McCloy said the Eyewitness software team will continue to develop these kinds of products because customers “feel really good about the operational benefits they get out their security systems.”

The company is intentionally “very vertically focused,” but it is currently “in conversations” with some critical infrastructure and utility customers and is considering expanding into that vertical market.