Building the “See Something, Say Something” AI for Every Camera

a16z's Martin Casado sits down with Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and cofounder of Ambient, the company bringing agentic AI to physical security. Shikhar shares how a traumatic armed robbery at age 12—and a security camera that no one was watching—sparked his mission to make every camera intelligent. They discuss how Ambient's AI monitors camera feeds in real-time to detect threats and prevent incidents before they happen, navigating COVID as a physical security company, building their own reasoning VLM called Pulsar, and why the future of security is AI not just detecting threats but automatically responding to them.