Firefly, a physical AI platform built for safety, has emerged from stealth with a US$20 million Series A round. Definition Capital led the investment, with significant participation from BoxGroup and continued backing from Susa Ventures. The company was founded in 2024 by James Batt Buckley and Alex Penn to bring advanced intelligence and design to physical safety technology.
Founding Team and Vision
Buckley previously helped scale the Alarms business at Verkada, where he worked with organizations ranging from K-12 schools to Fortune 500 companies. Penn, an MIT graduate, spent nearly a decade at Apple leading engineering teams and bringing products from initial concept to global scale. Together they saw an opportunity to modernize a safety industry that had long accepted complexity and disconnected tools.
How the Platform Works
Firefly combines purpose-built hardware, AI-powered software, and existing infrastructure such as cameras and radios into one intelligent system. The platform extracts intelligence from signals that traditional software could not interpret and connects information across separate technologies. This enables organizations to detect incidents, automate daily operations, and coordinate real time response from a single system.
Addressing Industry Challenges
The company argues that safety technology has lagged behind consumer and digital tools, often forcing teams to manage isolated systems. Cameras, radios, and sensors each generate useful data, but most still operate independently and require people to connect the dots. Firefly aims to move safety from systems that simply record events to platforms that understand situations and help teams take action.
Early Deployment
Firefly is already active at Front Range Community College, Colorado's largest community college. The deployment brings intelligence from three campuses into one unified system, helping safety teams understand events and coordinate responses more effectively. This early adoption highlights the platform's focus on education environments where clear communication and fast action are critical.
Leadership Perspective
Chief Executive Officer James Batt Buckley said safety teams have accepted a strange contradiction in which more important jobs come with more complicated tools. He added that Firefly's goal is to give people responsible for safety extraordinary capabilities while keeping them firmly in control. Chief Technology Officer Alex Penn noted that the company obsessed over every detail, from the hardware people carry to the software they use.
Investor Perspective and Market Opportunity
Definition Capital's Teddy Citrin said the stakes around physical safety have never been higher and that advances in AI and hardware are enabling organizations to rethink how they protect people. He described Firefly as building a central nervous system for physical safety that unifies specialized hardware, existing data, and coordinated action. The round also marks BoxGroup's third investment in Firefly and follows Susa Ventures' leadership of the company's Seed round.
Use of Funds and Growth Plans
The new capital will support the development of additional physical AI products and hiring across engineering, machine learning, and go-to-market teams. Firefly also plans to expand across education, healthcare, and enterprise organizations. These investments are intended to accelerate the company's goal of making the physical world more intelligent, connected, and programmable.
Firefly's public launch and Series A funding position the company to pursue a different standard for safety technology. By combining advanced AI, thoughtful design, and existing infrastructure, the startup is working to replace fragmented tools with a unified platform built for the people who rely on it. Its early traction and investor support suggest that demand for more intelligent physical safety solutions is growing.