There’s a serendipity to Verkada’s business that’s not lost on Chief Executive Officer Filip Kaliszan. When he founded the company in 2016 from his living room, his team was toying with the idea of a wireless door control system, but it wasn’t until three years later, when Verkada began firing on all cylinders, that he returned to the idea. Using technology from the security cameras for which the company was quickly growing famous, he “thought it would be fun” to connect that technology with door control, and—voila—his team made it happen.
“We put something together in our own office,” he recalled in a 2024 interview. “We tied it to the badge readers that we had [in] part of our building. And we were like, ‘Wait a minute.’ When you tie cameras and access control, and you make that integration really seamless, something magical happens and it's pretty cool.”
As Verkada nears its 10th year in business, its product line has expanded to include six categories: video security cameras, door-based access control, environmental sensors, alarms, workplace, and intercoms. It has gotten and retained the attention of Silicon Valley, having raised $200 million in Series E funding in February, led by General Catalyst with another significant investment from Eclipse.
The Stanford University graduate doesn’t follow his investors for ideas, though. He follows the consumers, in a virtuous circle that leads him back to the investors, and back to the customers, as long as the business keeps humming along. “That was kind of the very natural way that we happened upon the platform strategy,” he said, “which, of course, then became the next phase of our company's growth.”
The $200 million Series E put Verkada’s valuation at $4.5 billion, meaning that Kaliszan’s virtuous circle is spinning faster than even he likely could have imagined. With more than 1.5 million Verkada products in the world, more than 30,000 customers, and 70 percent of those customers using multiple Verkada products, it’s more like a Venn Diagram of success, with Kaliszan sitting in the middle of it all. It’s been a whirlwind. “It really blows my mind how quickly stuff changes,” he said, but at Verkada, he’s showing the value of a steady hand on the wheel.
