For some of us at Evolv, the mission of keeping people safe is personal

Fifteen years ago my college roommate perished as the north tower of the World Trade Center came down. Parents lost their child. A man lost his brother. A wife lost her husband. A son lost his father.

Twenty seven years ago I started my career, working two blocks from the World Trade Center. I lived and played in the shadows of those towers. A close friend and colleague from those banking days escaped the tragedy of September 11 and has spent the past fifteen years rebuilding his firm, honoring the sixty six lives that were lost, and helping the firm’s families.

September 11, 2001 has had a profound impact on how I look at the world and my contributions to it each day.

After a career helping companies use technology to address their business challenges, I am fortunate to be the co-founder of a company who is helping society address one of its biggest problems. I am working with a talented team of people that shares this passion and we’re dedicated to applying technology to help solve this difficult challenge in every place people live their daily lives.

As a team, we have worked in, looked at, and experimented with technology that has become pervasive in many other industries. There are so many different technologies: imaging sensors, human augmented machines, miniaturized compute platforms, artificial intelligence models, microservices-based architectures and augmented reality, to name just a few, that can be applied to making this world a safer place. These technologies can be combined in interesting ways using concepts such as a modular design, internet of things, software as a service, user-centric models and crowd sourcing to deliver compelling solutions.

Our team has spent the past three years together developing an architecture, a set of technologies, and our first product to address the persistent problem of ‘known wolves’ perpetrating harm on members of our global community. To address the continuously changing, pervasive threat, we have developed a system that, we hope, can be dynamic, intelligent, and effective in preventing these types of people from committing those types of acts.

I wake up each day driven by our mission. I don’t want another Steve to be taken from his family. I don’t want another Jon to have to comfort the families of lost colleagues. I don’t want my children to be concerned if they should go to a ball game or ride the train or enter an office building. I don’t want them to live that kind of life.