Erick Coser and Otávio Costa Miranda returned to Brazil in 2019 to address a major Latin American issue.
Both worked in construction firms to tackle urban challenges and saw a safety and information sharing issue.
Costa Miranda told Eltrys via email that Brazilian residents are among the top buyers of private CCTV systems; this is evident in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The fundamental critical performance metric for city monitoring is cameras per thousand residents, and Brazilian cities have the fewest.
Costa Miranda claimed New York and Los Angeles had 10 cameras per 1,000 people, while London has around 60. In São Paulo, there is one camera per thousand inhabitants. Costa Miranda deemed São Paulo “Brazil’s best-monitored city.”
Citizens use their own decentralized monitoring system with inexpensive, old cameras that police can’t access to investigate crimes.
Gabriel (2020), by Coser and Costa Miranda, drew on European experiences. To improve Latin American public safety, the firm uses cameras and computer vision in police operations.
Gabriel is installing and linking “Chameleons,” proprietary smart cameras, in users’ homes and businesses to face the streets to establish “Latin America’s largest urban intelligence infrastructure,” according to Costa Miranda. Data from photos is sent to authorities. Private individuals and homeowner associations subscribe.
Within three years, we have established the most dense camera networks in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, according to Costa Miranda.
Thousands of smart cameras operate. The business says its network has helped police uncover six crimes every day, a 5x increase in 12 months.
Over the previous year, Gabriel moved from negative gross margins to SaaS-like margins. Annual income doubled, and average ticket sales rose.
Qualcomm Ventures and Astella led a $7 million fundraising round today. SoftBank, Canary, LTS, Globo Ventures, Norte, and Endeavor also invested.
Coser and Costa Miranda want to use the additional money to build self-service technology for security company owners, governments, agents, and third-party suppliers to use Gabriel’s system.
“Making Latin America safe is one of those big, bold bets,” Coser emailed. We still need to construct a world-class video monitoring system with city-wide irregularity detection and dispatch that is completely compatible with our gear, simple to set up, and economical. This coincides with investments in the São Paulo takeover in 2024 and plans for new city launches in 2025.
