Featured Company: Envysion
Web Site: www.envysion.com
Headquarters: Louisville, Colorado
Year Founded: 2006
Founder: Dan Caruso, Executive Chairman
Investors: Columbia Capital; High Country Venture; Bear Equity
Employees: 29
By Matt Steinfort, CEO
Envysion provides a web-based video management service that enables organizations with multiple locations to use remote video to improve performance and profitability. Envysion Video is an enterprise-level solution that transforms traditional surveillance video into a strategic management tool that enables increases in efficiency, quality, brand consistency and the bottom line.
Envysion Video solves two main problems. The first is how to make video of multiple locations accessible to people throughout an organization. Envysion Video allows authorized users to view, search and share live and recorded video of any number of locations via a single password-protected web interface. Users can watch, analyze and improve whatever aspect of the organization they are involved with, whether it is security and loss prevention, operations, marketing, training or human resources.
The second is how to enable users to quickly find specific video. By integrating video with a customer’s point of sale (POS) or other event-based business data, Envysion enables users to click on events in a report (such as "voids" or sales of a certain product) and immediately see the associated video. Users can also create custom reports and receive automatic alerts when business rules that they define have been broken.
Founder's Story
Dan Caruso, Chairman of the Board of Envysion, Inc., was one of the founding executives of Level 3 Communications. From inception in 1997 through 2000, Dan was responsible for engineering, construction and operations. Between 2001 and 2003, he was responsible for most of the company's lines of business and marketing functions.
Between 2004 and 2006, Dan was president and CEO of ICG Communications. In 2004, he led a buyout of ICG and took it private. ICG, at the time, had about $100 million of debt and was burning their remaining $30 million of cash at a rate of $8 million a month. Columbia Capital and M/C Venture Partners, who backed the buyout, invested a total of $8.7 million. In 2006, ICG was sold to Level 3 for $170 million, resulting in a total distribution to the buyout group and management of over $225 million and a total return on investment of 25 times. The company was founded by former telecom executives who saw an opportunity to use their networking expertise to create a video service that takes full advantage of the power of the Internet. Thus, Envysion is the first video company to converge the full networking power of the Internet with the world of video surveillance. Video cameras are becoming ubiquitous, but until Envysion Video, there hadn't been an easy way to manage large numbers of geographically dispersed cameras and make them accessible to multiple people. As is often true with the best new technologies, Envysion Video is spurring users to create their own ideas for how video can be used, moving beyond traditional security and loss prevention functions and into other areas such as marketing, human resources, operations and training. This is the most significant impact of Envysion: it is enabling organizations to use IP communications in new ways and demonstrating that there are still many new uses and benefits of IP communications to be discovered.
Business model
Envysion’s business model is based on earning recurring revenue from software subscriptions. Each Envysion Video sale has up to three parts: hardware, software and installation. The hardware includes the cameras and recorders plus any accessories such as monitors or integration with a POS system. Envysion Video is camera-agnostic, so customers can provide their own video cameras rather than purchasing them from Envysion. The hardware can be paid for up front or spread out over the period of the software subscription. The software subscription includes licenses for accessing the Envysion Video application on the Internet for a specific period of time and for the number of cameras connected to the video recorder at each site. The software is usually licensed for 36 or 60 months, and we encourage customers to pay on a monthly subscription basis, although some choose to pay for the software subscription up front. The installation fee is always paid at the time of the installation of any cameras or recorders.
Current needs
Envysion recently received another round of $3 million funding from an existing investor. In the first half of 2009, the company will seek raise another round of capital.
As CEO of Envysion, Matt Steinfort is responsible for both the strategic direction and the day-to-day operation of Envysion. Prior to Envysion, Matt was SVP of Corporate Strategy at ICG Communications and held a variety of executive roles at Level 3 Communications, including VP of Consumer Voice, VP of Strategy and VP of Finance. Matt’s early career included stints at management consultancy Bain & Company and IT consultancy Cambridge Technology Partners. Matt received a BSE in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and an MBA from the MIT-Sloan School of Management.
