Alarm.com Holdings, the Northern Virginia company that allows people to run their home from a smartphone, is expanding into facial recognition that will allow customers to remotely identify activity in and around their home and business.
The company announced Monday that it is buying ObjectVideo, a Reston-based company that uses video monitoring to analyze patterns in real time. Terms were not disclosed.
ObjectVideo, led by Washington businessman Raul Fernandez, tracks objects, vehicles and people as it looks for activity and patterns around homes or businesses. It also allows you to just check on the kids.
The acquisition includes technology as well as video researchers and analysts.
"What we are doing is making the camera smarter," said Jeff Bedell, chief strategy and innovation officer at Alarm.com. "Inside the home, you can see when somebody who disarms the security system is a family member or a stranger. Outside, you can tell if your daughter's boyfriend's motorcycle is driving into your driveway when you are not at home."
Alarm.com is part of a wave of companies, big and small, seeking a foothold in the emerging "connected home" market, in which all manner of appliances and systems are linked to smartphones and tablets by the Internet.
Customers now can change the temperature in their home, unlock doors, turn on the lights and look for suspicious activity.
Publicly held Alarm.com has 500 employees, most of whom work at its Tysons Corner headquarters. The firm in 2015 earned $34.3 million before interest, taxes and depreciation on revenue of $209 million. It is set to announce 2016 results Wednesday.
Most of the 2.6 million properties covered by Alarm.com are in North America, but the business has expanded in recent years to Australia, New Zealand, and Central and South America.
The company last year partnered with Stockholm-based Securitas, one of the biggest security services in the world, as a path to enter Europe. "ObjectVideo scientists pioneered the field of teaching computers how to recognize and classify objects and patterns that were associated with dangerous behavior," said Fernandez, who is vice chairman of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the holding company for the Washington Wizards, the Washington Capitals and Verizon Center. "Under Alarm.com, the team can take that innovation to another level of commercialization and distribution."
ObjectVideo was founded in 1998 by scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The company's early years were spent working with the Defense Department to look for new ways to detect unusual activity.
It's not the first sale by ObjectVideo. In December 2014, it sold its portfolio of patents and their corresponding license agreements to a Canadian security company for $80.3 million.
ObjectVideo parted with nearly all of its intellectual property in an effort to repay the company's investors and fund a new wave of product development.