The Bay Area startup has closed a $35 million Series B, bringing total funding to $66 million as it expands an AI investigation platform that works with security systems businesses already own.
Physical-world AI is having its institutional moment. Coram AI has raised a $35 million Series B co-led by Ansa Capital and Battery Ventures, with UP.Partners, 8VC, and Mosaic Ventures also participating. The raise brings total funding to $66 million and signals that the category of AI applied to physical environments is maturing well beyond the chatbot wave that dominated headlines for the past few years.
According to Business Insider, Coram was founded in 2022 by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondruska, two engineers who brought autonomous systems experience into a market that still depends heavily on passive cameras and manual review. Jain previously led autonomy at Lyft's self-driving division and worked as an engineering leader at Zoox. Ondruska led AI research at Lyft and later at Toyota's Woven division after Toyota acquired Lyft's self-driving technology in 2021. That background matters because physical security is not just a software interface problem. It is a perception problem, an operations problem, and a trust problem all at once.
The core product is called Deep Investigation. Instead of having a security analyst scrub through hours of footage after an incident, operators can ask questions across cameras, badge readers, visitor logs, and emergency systems in plain language. A school could ask the system to find fights over the past month, identify patterns, blur student faces, and produce a report. A warehouse could ask how long trucks stay at loading docks or when a facility is busiest. What used to take hours of manual review can start to look more like a search query.
What makes Coram's go-to-market strategy genuinely clever is that it does not ask customers to rip out their existing infrastructure. The software connects with security equipment businesses already have installed, converting legacy systems into a more searchable intelligence layer. For enterprise sales cycles, that is a significant advantage. Security teams are not being asked to justify a full rip-and-replace capital expenditure to a CFO. They are being asked to license software that makes an existing sunk cost more useful.
The friction reduction is real. Physical security upgrades have historically been slow procurement cycles because they involve hardware, installation, and change management all at once. Coram's retrofit model moves more of that decision into a software conversation. It also expands the addressable market since the company is not limited to new buildings, fresh camera deployments, or customers already planning a major security overhaul.
The company now operates at more than 1,500 sites across the United States and Canada, including schools, churches, and commercial facilities. That span is notable. K-12 schools represent a buyer category with acute security concerns and chronically tight budgets, so a system that can work with existing equipment has a much easier path than one that requires a full hardware refresh. Commercial and industrial facilities bring a different need: compliance, incident documentation, and operational oversight across large physical footprints where manual monitoring is impractical.
The broader category shift
Battery Ventures had already backed Coram's $13.8 million Series A in January 2025, and its decision to co-lead the Series B is a meaningful signal. Since that earlier round, Jain told Business Insider that revenue has grown fourfold and the customer base has tripled. That is the detail investors care about at this stage. The story is no longer only about whether AI can make camera footage searchable. It is about whether customers keep expanding once the software is inside the building.
The broader investment context is worth noting. AI spending over the past two years has been dominated by foundation model compute, data tooling, and enterprise copilots. Physical-world AI, including vision systems, robotics-adjacent software, and sensor intelligence, has attracted quieter but increasingly serious capital. The institutional thesis is straightforward: the real world generates enormous amounts of visual and operational data, and most of it has never been made searchable in any practical way.
Security is an obvious place to start because the pain is easy to understand. Cameras are everywhere, but most of them are still useful mainly after something has already happened. Coram is trying to move that workflow closer to real-time detection, faster investigation, and automated response. The company says its system can help detect firearms, alert emergency services, and support lockdown procedures, which explains why schools have become an important early customer base.
The opportunity also comes with scrutiny. AI-powered security tools operate in sensitive environments, including schools, churches, hospitals, and workplaces. Buyers will want speed, but they will also want controls around privacy, access, accuracy, and false positives. That is especially true in a market where video security companies have already faced public concern over surveillance practices and data breaches. For Coram, technical performance will only be half the test. Governance will matter too.
The question for the next phase is depth of enterprise penetration. Running at more than 1,500 sites is a meaningful proof point, but the scaling challenge now shifts from landing customers to expanding usage within large accounts and retaining them through real workflow dependence. Deep Investigation is one product, while the platform ambition is broader. Watch whether Coram moves further into safety compliance, facilities operations, or autonomous security response. Any of those could increase contract size and make the software harder to displace. The $35 million gives the team enough runway to find out which expansion actually resonates.
Also read: Google told Crusoe to stop building and Crusoe stopped, and the market panic that followed revealed more about investor psychology than AI demand • Jeff Bezos closes a $12 billion Series B for Prometheus on the thesis that AI for engineers is the cleanest capital bet in the market right now • China turns everyday AI into its clearest edge over the US
