Solink, a video intelligence company founded in Ottawa, announced on Thursday that it has raised more than $100 million in new funding to expand its AI vision intelligence platform. The round was led by Toronto private equity firm Vertu Capital, with material participation from Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and new backing from Golub Growth and Comcast Ventures. Solink did not disclose a valuation for the round.
Cameras that already exist
Solink’s pitch is practical. Instead of asking retailers, restaurants and warehouse operators to install new hardware, its software reads the cameras they already have and turns the video into business data. The company says about 500,000 cameras at more than 35,000 customer locations in 65 countries feed into its platform.
The newest parts of that platform are its AI agents. Solink added agents for perimeter security and loss prevention work in February, running on edge devices so they do not need proprietary cameras. A month later, its VerifEye command centre for security operations gained vision-language models designed to filter out false alarms before a human operator ever sees them.
Solink describes the use cases in operational terms: readiness and safety, merchandising and day-to-day operations, with managers able to search video and receive alerts rather than watching hours of footage. The company frames that as a shift from seeing what happened to understanding what is happening, a line its chief executive, Mike Matta, repeated in the announcement.
Why investors are backing the bet
Vertu partner Eric Kafka called AI vision intelligence one of the most significant opportunities in software today, and said Solink had shown the foresight and execution needed to define the category. Goldman Sachs Alternatives managing director Mike Reilly pointed to strong customer adoption and an ambitious product vision, saying that participating again was a natural decision for the firm.
Including the new round, investors have now put more than $198 million into Solink. Goldman Sachs Alternatives previously led the company’s $60 million Series C round in July 2023, so the funding extends a relationship that spans several years. Solink said part of the money will also fund strategic opportunities, though it gave no detail on what those might be.
The round lands in a month for automation funding. Serval, which builds AI agents that replace software, raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation this month, as covered in our report on Serval’s funding round. Solink’s raise is smaller, but it points in the direction: investors are paying for AI that does work, not AI that answers questions.
What the announcement leaves out matters too. No valuation, no revenue figure and no customer names were disclosed, so the round’s size is the main hard number available. The test for Solink now is whether the new money converts into wider deployment across its existing customer base, rather than simply more cameras under management.
Why It Matters
Solink’s bet is that the physical world is the next place where AI earns its keep. Shops, restaurants and warehouses already generate vast amounts of video, most of it watched by nobody unless something goes wrong. Turning that footage into structured data about stock, staffing, safety and loss could change how those businesses are run, without a hardware refresh.
One question remains unanswered. Cameras that once recorded footage for review would, under this model, analyse what staff and customers do, and Solink says nothing about consent, retention or limits on that analysis. Similar automation is already spreading in warehouses, where AI robots now handle returns, as covered in our report on Otto’s robot returns system.
Background
Solink was founded in Ottawa in 2009, selling cloud video surveillance, before moving into AI analysis of the footage its customers’ cameras already capture.
Source: SiliconANGLE report and company announcement
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