Verkada Brand Guidelines: A 2016 Menlo Park Start-Up That Put Cameras and Doors in One Cloud

A class-data project, a Meraki veteran and a gym in Beverly Hills.

Verkada is a young company. English Wikipedia gives its founding as 2016, in Menlo Park, California, by three Stanford University graduates, Filip Kaliszan, James Ren and Benjamin Bercovitz, who were joined by Hans Robertson, a co-founder and former chief operating officer of Meraki, the networking company that became Cisco Meraki. The three Stanford founders had worked together before on CourseRank, a site that gathered class data for students; Wikipedia says it was bought by Chegg in 2010.

The company’s own leadership page still reflects that founding group. Verkada lists Kaliszan as chief executive and co-founder and Robertson as chairman and co-founder. Its headquarters is now in San Mateo, on the San Francisco Peninsula, and the company says it has seventeen offices, from Salt Lake City, Austin and New York to London, Krakow, Dubai, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore and Sydney.

The first cameras went in quickly. Wikipedia records that Verkada installed its first security cameras in 2017, at an Equinox gym in Beverly Hills. Two years later Forbes put the company on its Next Billion Dollar Startups list and on that year’s AI 50 list of promising artificial-intelligence companies, Wikipedia notes. Investment rounds followed in 2019, 2020 and 2023, and in December 2025 a round led by CapitalG, the growth fund of Google’s parent Alphabet, according to Wikipedia.

The business rests on one idea: the cameras, door readers and sensors are hardware, but the product people log into is software. English Wikipedia describes Verkada as a company that combines security equipment such as video cameras, access control systems and environmental sensors with cloud-based machine vision and artificial intelligence. The company describes itself as an early pioneer of cloud-based physical security.

From cameras to doors, alarms and air sensors.

Verkada began with cameras and widened its range year by year. According to English Wikipedia, the company launched its first access control device in spring 2020, a step away from selling only cameras and towards putting cameras and locks on a single platform. In September 2020 it added a set of environmental sensors that report readings such as air temperature and air quality, along with a feature that maps where people gather in a building.

Today the company presents six product families on its website: video security, access control, alarms, intercoms, air quality sensors and workplace tools such as visitor management. All of them are managed from Verkada Command, which the company calls its cloud-based management platform. Verkada says its devices store footage both on the device and in the cloud, receive automatic firmware and software updates, and can be bridged to existing cameras, alarm sensors and door hardware from other makers.

Artificial intelligence has become the main theme of the newer releases. Wikipedia says that in July 2025 Verkada added AI tools to its platform, including a “unified timeline” that draws data from several sources into one view of a single incident; the company’s own timeline places the feature in late 2025. On its home page Verkada also lists search across footage by description, spoken talk-down messages generated by AI, and hands-free facial authentication for opening doors.

The customer base is mostly organisations rather than households. Wikipedia puts the number of active customers at about 30,000 at the end of 2025, and the company’s home page uses the same figure. Verkada names retail, manufacturing, schools, healthcare, cities and counties and law enforcement among its markets. In 2026, Wikipedia adds, it opened an office in Dubai to grow in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and announced a partnership with Carahsoft to sell to government agencies; the company also says its Command platform has received a FedRAMP Moderate authorisation.

Design and documentation.

Access control is a quiet kind of design. Most people meet it as a small reader beside an office door, a keypad at a side entrance or a plastic card on a lanyard, and only notice it when the light turns from red to green. The makers in this guide build those readers, the cards and phone credentials that talk to them, the controllers and software behind them, and, increasingly, the cameras and video systems that sit alongside.

Much of the industry’s imagery comes from the building rather than the product. Pictures on company websites and in trade catalogues often show lobbies and turnstiles, staff badges clipped to belts, a phone held up to a door as a key, a guard desk facing a wall of video screens, and rows of server racks where the software runs. Some brands sell mainly through installers and integrators, so their pictures are aimed as much at the person fitting the door as at the person walking through it.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. ISC West in Las Vegas is where HID Global was introduced to the security industry in April 2006, according to the formation announcement reprinted by SecurityInfoWatch; Security Essen, held in the German city of Essen, is another fixture of the calendar. Trade titles such as Security Today and Benchmark report on product launches, new factories and the industry’s own awards.

Ownership in the sector ranges from family firms to divisions of large lock and technology groups, and several brands have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A breach, a federal case and a patent dispute.

Verkada’s short history includes two episodes that are part of the public record. In March 2021 outsiders gained access to the company’s network for about 36 hours, English Wikipedia reports, and early accounts said they could view footage from a very large number of customer cameras. Wikipedia says that in April 2021 the company announced new measures, among them red-team and blue-team exercises, a bug bounty programme, mandatory two-factor authentication for its support staff and more audit logs for customers.

The breach later became part of a federal case. On 30 August 2024 the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement with Verkada, as the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth summarised on its privacy blog in September 2024. The FTC alleged that the company had experienced at least two security breaches between December 2020 and March 2021, and that it had broken the CAN-SPAM Act’s rules on commercial email. The proposed order required an information security programme with third-party audits, a civil penalty, and a ban on misrepresenting the company’s privacy and data security practices. English Wikipedia records that the case was filed by the US Department of Justice and settled.

A second dispute was with a larger rival. In August 2021 Motorola Solutions filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission alleging that Verkada cameras and software infringed patents held by its subsidiary Avigilon, and Verkada answered with a suit of its own in California. Wikipedia says an administrative law judge first found infringement of one of the three patents in October 2022, but on 4 April 2023 the ITC issued a final determination that Verkada’s products did not infringe any of the three.

Verkada’s logo, typeface and colours are not set out in any published guideline, so this guide treats the look of the brand as an interpretation. What the company does document is a consistent idea: every product family it sells is managed from one piece of software, Command.

For a design guide, Verkada shows how a security maker can build its identity around a single platform rather than a single device, and how a young company’s public record becomes part of its story. Compare the much older radio maker Motorola Solutions and its video brand Avigilon. For this guide we use a slate, white and teal palette with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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