Conntour, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has closed a $7 million funding round led by General Catalyst to build an AI-powered search engine for security video systems. The Israeli company, which emerged from operations in Tel Aviv and Miami, is attacking a longstanding inefficiency in security work: the sheer drudgery of searching video archives.
The platform uses AI models to let security personnel query camera feeds using natural language to find any object, person, or situation in footage in real time, functioning as a Google-like search engine made specifically for security video feeds. Rather than specifying detection rules beforehand, operators can ask open-ended questions: find someone carrying a red backpack, or individuals wearing baseball caps near the front entrance yesterday.
The practical advantage over legacy systems is substantial. Traditional video analytics systems require operators to set parameters for specific object types, motion patterns, or behaviours before incidents occur. This rigid, template-based approach leads to missed events, high false-alarm rates, and time-consuming manual review. Conntour claims its system uses natural and vision language models, which lends it a high degree of flexibility and usability.
Scaling is where Conntour distinguishes itself technically. The system can monitor up to 50 camera feeds off a single consumer GPU like Nvidia's RTX 4090. The company does this by using multiple models and logic systems, and identifying which models and systems the algorithm should use for each query to require the lowest amount of computing power. For security teams managing hundreds or thousands of cameras, this efficiency matters to budget and infrastructure costs.
Conntour already has several large government and publicly listed customers, one of which is Singapore's Central Narcotics Bureau. The early Asia-Pacific traction signals a strategic opportunity in a region with sophisticated government security operations and well-funded enterprise surveillance deployments. The company completed an $80K proof-of-concept with the Singapore government, leading toward a $2M per year contract.
The market itself is maturing. The global video surveillance market exceeded $50 billion in 2025, with enterprises managing hundreds or thousands of cameras across facilities. Yet the tooling for actually using that footage has barely evolved beyond digital versions of VCR controls. Security teams regularly cite video review as one of their most time-consuming tasks, particularly during investigations or compliance audits.
Conntour is entering a market where incumbents like traditional security camera manufacturers have been slow to innovate beyond basic analytics. Companies like Verkada and Rhombus have modernised the hardware and cloud infrastructure side, but the search and query capabilities have remained relatively primitive. That has created an opening for software-first startups to build on top of existing camera infrastructure.
The broader investment signal matters. The $7 million round indicates that investors see enterprise AI moving beyond productivity software into operational infrastructure. Security video represents the kind of data-rich, labour-intensive workflow where AI can deliver immediate ROI. This suggests patient capital backing companies pursuing unglamorous but valuable efficiency gains in physical security operations.
One tension remains unresolved: the ethics of advanced video surveillance. According to Matan Goldner, co-founder and CEO of Conntour, the ethics around this topic are important enough that his company is quite picky about which clients to sell to. He says "we're really in control of who is using it, what is the use case, and we can select what we think is moral and, of course, legal." As video search capabilities improve, the decisions about who deploys them and under what constraints become more consequential. Conntour's selectivity in customer vetting reflects real concern in the sector about surveillance overreach, even as the technology itself becomes more powerful and accessible.