Firefly Raises $20M Series A to Build a New Standard for Safety

Physical AI company combines advanced intelligence and an uncompromising approach to design to rethink safety technology.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Firefly, the physical AI platform for safety, today emerged from stealth with a $20 million Series A led by Definition Capital, with significant participation from BoxGroup and continued backing from Susa Ventures. The round marks BoxGroup's third investment in Firefly while Susa Ventures previously led the company's seed round.

Founded in 2024 by James Batt Buckley and Alex Penn, Firefly brings together two distinct perspectives on technology. At Verkada, Buckley helped scale the Alarms business from K-12 schools to Fortune 500 companies, seeing firsthand the complexity safety teams had come to accept. Penn, an MIT graduate, spent nearly a decade at Apple, leading engineering teams and bringing products from concept to global scale. Together, they saw an opportunity to bring a new standard of intelligence and design to an industry long overdue for both.

AI is transforming how we work and interact with the digital world. But the technology protecting our physical world has barely changed. Cameras capture footage. Radios carry conversations. Sensors trigger alarms. Each generates valuable information, yet most systems still operate in isolation, leaving people to connect the dots and coordinate what happens next.

The next frontier for AI isn't just digital. It's physical. Advances in AI, edge computing and hardware are making that leap possible now. Firefly brings purpose-built hardware, AI-powered software and existing infrastructure, including cameras and radios, together into one intelligent system. By extracting intelligence from signals that traditional software couldn't interpret and connecting information across technologies, Firefly can detect incidents, automate daily operations and coordinate action in real time. It's a shift from technology that simply records events to technology that understands what's happening and helps teams act on it.

Firefly believes technology this powerful deserves an equally ambitious approach to design. Every interaction, from the hardware people carry to the software they use, is engineered around the people relying on it. The result is sophisticated intelligence made remarkably simple, giving teams greater visibility, context and control without added complexity.

The ambition is to make the physical world as intelligent, connected and programmable as the digital one, starting with safety.

“We've accepted a strange contradiction in safety technology: the more important the job, the more complicated the tools seem to become,” said James Batt Buckley, co-founder and CEO of Firefly. “We now have the technology to build something fundamentally different. Our goal is to give the people responsible for safety extraordinary capabilities, while keeping them firmly in control. We're starting with safety because it's a problem we know deeply, but what we're building has the potential to transform how people interact with the physical world.”

“People have incredibly intuitive technology in their pockets, but when they go to work protecting others, they're expected to operate a maze of complicated systems,” said Alex Penn, co-founder and CTO of Firefly. “We didn't want to accept that. We've obsessed over every detail, from the hardware people carry to the software they use and how the two work together. The complexity should be ours to solve, not theirs.”

Firefly is already putting this approach to work at Front Range Community College, Colorado's largest community college, bringing intelligence from across three campuses into one system that helps safety teams understand what's happening and coordinate response.

“The stakes around physical safety have never been higher,” said Teddy Citrin of Definition Capital. “At the same time, advances in AI and hardware are making it possible to rethink how organizations protect their people. Firefly is building the central nervous system for physical safety, bringing together specialized hardware, existing data, and coordinated action into a single platform.”

The funding will support new physical AI products, hiring across engineering, machine learning and go-to-market, and expansion across education, healthcare and enterprise organizations. Learn more at firefly.co.

About Firefly

Firefly is the physical AI platform for safety. Combining purpose-built hardware, AI-powered software and existing infrastructure into one intelligent system designed around people, Firefly helps organizations understand what's happening and coordinate action, from everyday readiness to emergency response.

Technology designed to protect people.