Conntour raised $7 million from General Catalyst and YC for AI search across surveillance footage

Conntour has raised $7 million from General Catalyst and Y Combinator to create an AI-powered video surveillance search tool. The startup offers security teams a fundamentally new instrument: instead of manually reviewing hours of footage, an operator enters a text query in plain language — and the system instantly finds the necessary fragments from hundreds of camera feeds. Imagine a scenario: a large shopping mall, a thousand cameras, an incident at the north entrance around 3 p.

m. Previously, an operator would spend hours rewinding recordings from the necessary cameras within the correct time window. With Conntour's system, it's enough to write "man in a blue jacket, north entrance, 2:30 p.

m.–3:00 p.m."

— and AI delivers exact fragments in seconds. The technology can process more complex queries as well: for example, "all instances when a visitor left luggage unattended for more than five minutes" or "a person who appeared at the service entrance several times within an hour." At its core are multimodal language models trained to understand the content of video frames and match it with arbitrary text queries.

The $7 million investment round was led by General Catalyst — one of the largest venture capital funds in the U.S. with a portfolio including Airbnb, Snap, Stripe, and Hubspot.

Simultaneously, Y Combinator also entered the round — an accelerator that launched Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, and thousands of other companies. YC traditionally invests at the earliest stage; its participation signals that Conntour passed rigorous selection and gained access to one of the most influential contact networks in Silicon Valley. The market the startup is targeting is enormous.

The global video surveillance market, according to analysts, will exceed $80 billion by 2028. Cameras are installed everywhere: in shopping malls, airports, manufacturing facilities, office buildings, residential complexes. The main industry challenge is not a lack of data, but an excess of it.

An average large facility generates terabytes of video recordings daily. Finding a specific incident manually is an enormously labor-intensive task. AI-powered search solves it fundamentally: a person describes what they're looking for, and the system finds it in seconds.

The competitive landscape is already saturated, but the segment is actively growing. Verkada, Avigilon (a division of Motorola Solutions), Milestone Systems — all are integrating AI features into their platforms. Among specialized startups, Spot AI, BriefCam, and Arcules stand out.

Conntour's differentiator is its bet on natural language as the primary interface, not a supplementary one. This fundamentally lowers the entry barrier for non-technical users: security guards, facility managers, compliance specialists, who don't need to learn complex system configurations. The raised funds will go toward scaling the engineering team, product refinement, and the first major enterprise contracts.

Conntour is a characteristic example of a broader shift: AI is transforming video surveillance systems from passive archives stored "just in case" into active analysis tools. Camera recordings stop being mere storage and become full-fledged databases that can be queried the same way as spreadsheets or corporate search. If the startup realizes what it promises at the scale of real enterprise installations — it will change security service standards worldwide.