Lumana Raises $40 Million to Transform Security Cameras into Real-Time AI Surveillance Systems

In a major step toward redefining how we secure and monitor the physical world, Lumana, a pioneer in AI-powered video surveillance, has secured $40 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Wing Venture Capital, with continued backing from Norwest and S Capital, bringing the company’s total raised to $64 million.

Unlike traditional security providers, Lumana is building what it calls an AI-native surveillance platform — one that turns ordinary security cameras into context-aware systems capable of identifying threats, understanding behavior, and initiating automated responses in real time. At the heart of this transformation is Lumana’s integration of vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic AI, enabling video feeds to become intelligent participants in security, safety, and operational workflows.

“We’re building the infrastructure for cameras to perceive, understand context, and take action — not just watch,” said Sagi Ben Moshe, founder and CEO of Lumana. “This funding accelerates our ability to meet fast-growing demand across sectors that urgently need smarter physical-world intelligence.”

From Passive Video to Proactive Surveillance

Founded in 2021 and emerging from stealth in April 2024, Lumana is now used by major institutions such as McDonald’s, Meta, New York University, and the Minnesota Twins. These organizations are part of a broader trend: moving away from manual video monitoring toward AI-driven automation that provides immediate, actionable insights.

The company’s cloud-based platform manages over a billion images per day, detects high-risk behaviors, and helps operators review thousands of hours of footage in seconds. Cameras connected to Lumana can detect violence, theft, fire, unauthorized access, safety violations, and more — and can even integrate external data to generate alerts before an incident escalates.

“Lumana enables cameras to deliver real-time intelligence and insights,” said Peter Wagner, Founding Partner at Wing Venture Capital. “Their system does what traditional surveillance systems can’t — it learns, adapts, and scales operational decision-making.”

A Centralized Brain for Decentralized Eyes

What makes Lumana stand out is its agent-based architecture — intelligent assistants dedicated to tasks like identification, tracking, safety enforcement, compliance monitoring, and integration with third-party systems. These agents form an active layer on top of video infrastructure, making decisions without requiring constant human oversight.

Recent updates to the platform include:

• AI-generated alerts for threats like weapons, fire, falls, and unauthorized access
• Custom dashboards that convert surveillance into business insights
• 100+ searchable attributes for fast investigations
• Event Tagging to connect third-party data streams with real-time video analysis

Companies are using Lumana not only for safety, but also for operational optimization. At SpinXpress, a growing laundromat chain, Lumana helps analyze customer dwell time, optimize staffing, and secure sensitive areas — all from one dashboard. At Extech Building Materials, video data is used to reduce shrinkage and collaborate more effectively with law enforcement.

The Road Ahead: From Surveillance to Situational Awareness

Lumana’s trajectory suggests a broader shift in how organizations interact with the physical world — not just watching but interpreting, learning, and assisting. The company’s long-term vision extends beyond surveillance, aiming to integrate video with sensor data, contextual cues, and external inputs to support real-time situational awareness.

This could enable use cases such as dynamic crowd control in public spaces, more responsive safety protocols in industrial settings, and smarter coordination during emergencies — all without relying entirely on manual oversight. The modular nature of Lumana’s platform means it can be adapted to diverse environments, from city streets to corporate campuses.

Rather than replacing humans, the goal is to augment decision-making where speed, scale, and context matter most. As AI becomes more capable of operating in real-world settings, platforms like Lumana will likely play a role in shaping how those environments are managed — not by watching more closely, but by understanding more clearly.

Still, as these systems become more embedded in everyday life, they raise important questions about privacy, consent, and oversight. Widespread deployment of AI-driven surveillance will require society to re-evaluate how much monitoring we find acceptable — and under what conditions.

As founder and CEO Sagi Ben Moshe put it, “The next frontier isn’t just AI that watches. It’s AI that collaborates — that supports humans in real-world environments, makes decisions in milliseconds, and ultimately creates safer, more efficient spaces.” The challenge ahead will be ensuring that this future is not only intelligent, but also accountable.