A guard at a campus gate sees something on a monitor, reaches for a radio, and spends the next half minute describing it. Firefly Technology wants software to cover that gap.
The company closed a $20M Series A led by Definition Capital, an investor that had already backed Ramp and Cognition. BoxGroup, now three checks into the business, and Susa Ventures, which wrote the seed earlier in 2026, also participated.
James Batt Buckley, who co-founded and runs Firefly, starts from a complaint about his own trade. Security gear has grown harder to use as the stakes rise, he argues, and cameras, radios and sensors still behave as separate islands.
Ember, the firm’s safety management platform, pulls signal out of that installed hardware, identifies an incident, supplies context and lines up the response. Wearable panic buttons, AI beacons that triangulate gunshots and a network gateway are built in-house and connect to the same stack.
First campus, then hospitals
Front Range Community College, the largest in Colorado, runs the system across three campuses, where safety staff use one shared picture during emergencies. Firefly is now chasing hospitals, enterprise campuses and more schools.
Holger Mueller of Constellation Research said always-on machinery never blinks the way a guard does, so alerts should arrive sooner and prove more dependable. He also asked for caution about whether the systems perform as promised.
Teddy Citrin, at Definition, frames the company as a central nervous system for physical safety. A false trigger at a school is not a bug report, and the platform is early enough that the claim stays untested.
