Safety in Motion: Evolv Technology’s Public Listing

Animal life on earth relies on movement — migrations through the cycles of feeding, repro­duc­tion, and death. Animal migrations in large numbers depend on safety, even the community and shared knowledge that the herd provides. Humans also have migrations, whether local movements to schools, enter­tain­ment, work, longer trips like vacations, or even emigrations to new lands. And our migrations rely on safety and community, too.

Recently, human movements were frustrated by the continuing rise of violence in public venues — especially shootings — and the COVID-19 pandemic, both of which limited movements and created anxiety and sorrow in communities. Now, as the pandemic appears to wane, people want to return to ordinary life as quickly as possible. Society demands solutions that make vulnerable populations feel safe in public spaces, which support changing expec­ta­tions for more fric­tion­less movements and fewer inter­ac­tions with strangers.

For over a century, the best physical security tech­nolo­gies restricted the movement of people at a massive scale. As a result, most people’s security experience occurs when entering a public venue; we walk through a technology initially developed for prisons: the metal detector. Metal detectors aren’t a terrible technology, but they falsely identify so many harmless objects that security guards must root through bags and pockets in slow, error-prone manual searches.

Mike Ellenbogen and Anil Chitkara founded DCVC portfolio company Evolv Technology after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing to address gun and weapon violence, a scourge that interrupts the natural flow of how we work, live, learn, play, and worship. Evolv delivers a contrasting experience: its technology finds more weapons than metal detectors. It also finds guns and knives missed through traditional bag checks that are not screened. It is a technology built to support the free flow of human migration into venues.

Evolv is a paragon of DCVC’s Deep Tech investment thesis: the company uses science (including sensors and radio frequencies) and AI (machine learning) to deliver a faster, safer, and more free-flowing experience. And it is cheaper than its predecessor: when you account for the highest cost of physical security — guards — Evolv is less expensive on a total cost of ownership basis than metal detectors when used at scale.

Safety in Motion

Today, Evolv becomes a public company. Under the leadership of CEO Peter George, the company has seen explosive growth and a rapidly expanding market over the past 18 months, including a quickly growing customer base, a deeper product line, and the best management team in the physical security industry.