Erick Coser and Otávio Costa Miranda returned to Brazil in 2019 to solve a large, but unsolved problem in Latin America.
Both had backgrounds in construction companies solving urban problems and identified a problem with security and how to share information.
“Brazilian citizens are already some of the top buyers of private CCTV systems in the world, which is easy to notice when walking the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo,” Costa Miranda told TechCrunch via email. “At the same time, Brazilian cities are among those with the lowest number of cameras per thousand citizens, the main key performance indicator for measuring how well a city is monitored.”
Costa Miranda said cities like New York and Los Angeles have 10 cameras per 1,000 people, while in London, that’s more than 60 cameras. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, that’s one camera per thousand people. In fact, Costa Miranda called São Paulo “the best-watched city in Brazil.”
Instead, citizens there use their own decentralized surveillance grid, but use cheap and outdated cameras that are inaccessible to crime-solving police officers.
Coser and Costa Miranda used the experiences of Europe to create Gabriel in 2020. The company integrates cameras and computer vision with routine police operations to address public security challenges across Latin America.
Gabriel is building what Costa Miranda touts as “Latin America’s largest urban information infrastructure” by installing and connecting proprietary smart cameras, called “Chameleons,” to subscribers’ homes and businesses to view the streets. Data is extracted from images and then made available to the authorities. Typical subscribers are private citizens and homeowners associations.
“For the last three years, we already have the densest camera networks of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo,” said Costa Miranda.
This includes thousands of smart cameras in operation. The company advertises that its network has helped police solve an average of six crimes a day, a 5-fold increase over the past 12 months.
Over the past year, Gabriel has gone from a negative gross margin to a SaaS-like margin business. It also increased its average ticket and doubled its revenue year-on-year.
Today, the company announced $7 million in new funding in a round led by Qualcomm Ventures and Astella. It also included existing investors SoftBank, Canary, LTS, Globo Ventures, Norte and Endeavor.
Coser and Costa Miranda intend to use the new funding to further develop technology so that security business owners, governments, agents and third-party providers can operate Gabriel’s system on a self-service basis.
“Making Latin America safe is one of those big, bold bets,” Coser said via email. “To get there, we still have a lot of work to do to create a world-class video surveillance system combined with city-wide anomaly detection and dispatch, fully interoperable with our hardware, easy to set up and affordable. This goes hand in hand with strong investments for the acquisition of São Paulo in 2024 and preparations for the launch of new cities in 2025.”
