Brivo Brand Guidelines: A 1999 Delivery Box, Cloud Access Control and the Eagle Eye Merger

A delivery box before a door controller.

Brivo was launched in 1999 and is based in Bethesda, Maryland. English Wikipedia, citing a December 2000 report in The Washington Post, names its co-founders as Carter Griffin, Tim Ogilvie and Mark Stein. Steve Van Till, whom Security Today called “Brivo’s Founder” in December 2025, told International Security Journal in March 2026 that he launched the company together with its co-founders, after a career that took him through satellite communications, healthcare informatics and large web applications.

Its first product was not a door controller. According to Van Till, the company was first designed around e-commerce deliveries and built the Smart Box, managing access for homeowners, for businesses and for carriers such as FedEx and the US Postal Service. Wikipedia says the company took investment from IDEO Ventures, whose affiliate, the design firm IDEO, became the development partner for that first product, a last-mile solution for receiving parcels when no one was home.

The company then changed course. Because the infrastructure, communications and connected devices were similar, Van Till said, it applied the technology it had developed to a known market that was a good fit: commercial access control. He dates that decision to around 2000; Wikipedia dates the introduction of Brivo’s software-as-a-service platform for building access control to 2002.

Hosted access control, then a new owner.

Brivo’s product history is one of door hardware tied to a hosted service. Wikipedia records the ACS5000 access-control system of 2005, with Ethernet and GSM cellular connections; an XML application programming interface in 2007; an IP door controller in 2011, a compact Ethernet panel powered over the network cable; and Brivo Onair in 2013, which combined cloud access control and video surveillance in one interface. The ACS6000 and ACS300 door controllers followed, and the ACS300 wireless controller won the “Access Control Software & Controllers” category of the best-product awards at the 2018 ISC West conference, Wikipedia says. It also notes that Gartner named Brivo a “Cool Vendor” in identity and access management for 2014.

Ownership changed in June 2015, when Brivo was acquired by Dean Drako, founder and former chief executive of Barracuda Networks and founder of the cloud video company Eagle Eye Networks; Drako became Brivo’s chairman. He said he saw an opportunity to speed up the shift to cloud technology in physical security by combining Brivo’s cloud access control with Eagle Eye’s cloud video surveillance, Wikipedia records; by then Brivo said its system served more than ten million users and more than 100,000 access points, such as doors. Van Till told International Security Journal that he had first met Drako in 2013, seated beside him on a panel at an industry event. For a decade the two companies stayed apart: Drako wanted each to remain focused on its own product, Van Till said, having seen products muddled by mergers in other technology fields.

Brivo kept expanding in the meantime. In March 2020 it bought Parakeet, an internet-of-things company, as part of a move into smart buildings, and in 2023 it raised financing from SECOM, according to Wikipedia. The same article describes two later software products: Brivo Access, a tool built into the platform that turns door events into custom reports and charts, and Brivo Snapshot, which applies machine learning to combined access-control and video data.

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.

One name for access and video.

The two companies merged at the end of 2025. On 29 December, Security Today reported, Drako announced that Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks would merge and operate under the Brivo name, with Drako as chief executive and Van Till as president. Van Till said the two had “shared the same vision and ownership for a decade,” so the merger was about aligning operations. The merged company gave its US headquarters as Bethesda and Austin, Texas, with further offices in Lehi, Utah, and in Amsterdam, Bangalore and Tokyo.

The brand now gathers both product lines. The Brivo Security Suite, Drako said, brings AI, access control, video intelligence, visitor management and intrusion detection into a single solution, and the company said it would keep supporting other makers’ video and access-control systems. Brivo’s website, in November 2026, lists Brivo Eagle Eye video editions beside its own credentials, readers, control panels and commercial door locks, with sector pages running from multifamily housing and coworking spaces to retail, parking and schools. The site is offered in English, Dutch, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

Van Till’s own account of the merger stresses timing rather than novelty: in 2026 he told International Security Journal that customers had become more interested in merged platforms, and that at the joint events the two companies held over the years someone in the audience would usually ask why they were not one company. In the same interview he described Brivo as the first cloud-native access-control company that he was aware of, something completely new in 1999.

For a design guide, Brivo shows how a brand born around a parcel box became the umbrella name for a merged access-control and video company. Compare Kisi and Verkada, two more names in this series of access-control and video brands. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a cool slate and a bright teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brivo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.