It sounds like the opening scene of a surveillance thriller. A startup is turning San Francisco into a searchable video feed.
Orchestra, a 10-month-old company, has installed more than 100 street cameras throughout the city, providing live coverage of neighborhoods such as SoMa, the Tenderloin, North Beach and the Marina. An additional 900 cameras will be installed on major commercial corridors across the city over the next six months.
Pitch is like a Google search, but for city streets. “This is a search engine for the physical world,” said Stefania Stavropoulos, co-founder and chief operating officer.
Orchestra installs free street cameras on the premises of private companies. The cameras stream high-definition video 24 hours a day, and AI converts the footage into structured data to identify objects, vehicles, and incidents. Co-founder and CEO Drake Burciaga called this video “the e-phone of data” because of its superior quality.
The startup plans to sell different types of structured data, rather than raw footage, to a wide range of customers. Police may use the video as evidence in a criminal investigation. Insurance companies can use this to determine who is at fault in car accidents. And self-driving car companies could use certain data before expanding into new cities, Burciaga said. Other customers, such as real estate companies, may receive analysis reports about foot traffic in their neighborhoods, he added.
Orchestras are entering the market amid growing public backlash against AI-powered cameras. Since early last year, 50 cities and counties have terminated contracts or disabled cameras with Atlanta-based surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Concerns center on privacy, data sharing and the hacker’s video showing how he gained access to the live video feed from the Flock’s camera.
“We don’t offer complete access to camera networks, and we don’t have customers building directly on top of raw camera feeds,” Stavropoulos said.
The orchestra said it does not use facial recognition, instead identifying anonymized people by clothing and other details. orchestra
Orchestra is raising a seed round and says it is building “AGI for cities.” AGI (artificial general intelligence) is an AI industry term that refers to systems that match or exceed human intelligence. Orchestra calls the video model it’s building “omniscience,” underscoring its ambitions to expand the network to every major city in the U.S. and eventually around the world.
“It’s the ability to know everything: past, present and future,” Burciaga said. “We’re all Christians so we’re careful, but some might call this God mode.”
“Cameramen”
A few weeks ago, I visited the orchestra’s headquarters, a small office on the top floor of a building in downtown San Francisco. Ms. Stavropoulos showed me one of her own paintings hanging on the wall. It was a colorful work that fused a female bust with the shape of a violin. He then spotted Burciaga sitting on the balcony wearing cowboy boots and a denim jacket with an American flag sewn on the sleeve.
Burciaga dropped out of college and launched his first startup in 2021, a platform that helps drivers and self-driving cars find on-street parking. But when we tried to map real-world activity, we realized there was an even bigger market opportunity.
“Digital is already indexed,” he says. “But in the physical world, it’s a blue ocean.”
Of course, Google Street View has mapped much of the physical world. But Orchestra is doubling down on building a private street view that streams high-definition video of every commercial corridor day and night.
Burciaga assembled a dream team to build this startup. His first call was to Stavropoulos, a longtime family friend from Chicago who ran a supply chain business. He persuaded her to move to San Francisco and direct the orchestra’s operations.
Then he brought on two older co-founders. They are Bruno Beccaria, a former Citadel legal and compliance executive whom Burciaga met while playing soccer, and Michael Cohen, an MIT-trained computer scientist. Beccaria will serve as chief technology officer and Cohen will lead AI.
Co-founders Bruno Beccaria and Michael Cohen orchestra
Despite all the sci-fi overtones, the founders insist they’re not building an Orwellian surveillance system.
They say the orchestra does not have cameras in residential areas, and people’s faces are blurred in the video feed. Instead of using facial recognition, the system can identify anonymized people by details such as clothing and shoes. The company said it retains some of the raw footage, but access is severely restricted and it will never sell it to customers.
“There’s always been a trade-off between security and privacy,” Burciaga said. “But now we can anonymize the data, so we can get all the good parts of the data without compromising people’s privacy.”
The founders said they encountered little opposition as they installed cameras around the city. Instead, they became known as “camera guys” and began receiving calls from businesses asking them to install cameras multiple times a week. One of San Francisco’s largest gym chains contacted Orchestra several weeks ago, and the company said its cameras are now installed at all of the chain’s stores. The orchestra declined to reveal Jim’s name.
Orchestra said it has built in safeguards to avoid privacy issues and hacking. Burciaga brought on Beccaria, who has nearly 20 years of experience in hedge fund compliance, to strengthen its control over data access. The company said it meets regularly with cybersecurity advisors to harden its systems. The founders said they are considering putting the platform on the blockchain to create tamper-proof logs of who accessed the footage and when.
“RoboCop”
The company’s initial focus is public safety. Orchestra has developed a product called “Robocop,” an AI agent designed to investigate incidents before a human is assigned to them.
RoboCop monitors San Francisco’s 911 emergency call data through DataSF, the city’s data portal where anyone can access city data and real-time feeds. When a high-priority incident occurs near Orchestra’s camera network, the system captures the relevant footage and packages it into evidence files called “Veritas.”
Orchestra is not currently working with the San Francisco Police Department, but said it is taking the necessary steps to eventually sell its platform to the department.
The founders said they vet all potential customers and push how they plan to use the platform. The company did not disclose a specific framework for evaluating customers, but said it has turned down local governments that have approached it.
“We’ll be able to train the best parking enforcement officers and bring in a lot of revenue for the city by tipping people off,” Burciaga said. “It’s a very boring way to live, and the income is poor.”
When I asked if the orchestra would sell to the Chinese government, Burciaga pointed to the American flag sewn onto his jacket.
“Look at this American flag,” he said. “We are America first.”
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