London
July 2026
Security is one of the world's biggest unsolved problems.
Almost everywhere, homes and offices and businesses are guarded by cameras that record everything and understand nothing. The footage sits on a drive until somebody thinks to look at it, which is usually hours after the thing you wanted to prevent has already happened. Individuals have less than that. Once you step outside your house or place of work, you are carrying nothing. On the road, in a taxi, walking home at night, the only plan is your phone and the hope that whoever you reach is close enough and awake enough to matter. There is no number that reliably answers, and no way to know whether help is coming.
The scale is not in question. Violence cost the world economy US$21.8 trillion in 2025 on the Institute for Economics and Peace's estimate, and global peacefulness has fallen in most years since that index began. The response nearly everywhere has been the same: more cameras. They are in the lobby, the corridor, the car park and the street, and almost none of them are watched by anyone at the moment they see something. Recording was never the hard part. Watching is.
Cameras have become cheap. Guards have not, and no country is going to hire its way to safety. The gap is not manpower. It is knowing what is happening while it is still happening, and having someone on the way before it ends.
We felt this ourselves. Our previous company's office was broken into. We had cameras and we had footage. We watched it afterwards and saw the men who walked in and the door they left through, hours after they were gone, because nothing in the system was built to tell anyone at the time. Even if something had noticed, the harder question is who it would have told. It happened in the middle of the night. Everyone with a reason to care was at home asleep, and there was no path from a camera on a wall to a person who could do anything about it. Separately, one of us was in an accident where unlocking a phone and working out who to call was not a realistic option.
So we are building on three fronts.
The first is intelligence for the cameras that already exist. A Warden runs on a small device installed on site. It watches the feeds locally, understands what it is looking at, and raises the alarm when something is wrong. It keeps working without a constant internet connection, because a security system that fails when the network fails is not a security system.
The second is for people rather than buildings. A button you carry and press in an emergency, which puts your location and your situation in front of a response network that is already expecting the call.
The third is the part nobody sees. The night our office was robbed, the problem was not only that nothing noticed. It was that there was nowhere for the alert to go. Response in most of the world is still coordinated over phone calls and messaging apps, with no record of who was told, who moved, or how long any of it took. We are building the dispatch software that sits underneath, for government command centres and private response companies alike, so that an incident becomes a job with an owner and a clock on it. The camera and the button are the sensors. Dispatch is what turns a signal into somebody arriving.
Security has always been sold as a luxury, in the form of a guard at the gate or a response contract that only a company can afford. We think the floor should be higher than that. Everyone should be able to call for help and have it arrive, whether they own the building or rent a room in it.
At Vatar, we are building the intelligence and the response network to make safety affordable and effective for everyone who needs it.
