Protent

Protent turns passive surveillance into proactive intelligence.

Winter 2026ActiveB2BSecurityHardwareMachine LearningSaaSGovTechSecuritySan Francisco, CA, USA

Company

We provide real-time video intelligence that identifies escalating incidents as they unfold. Protent detects early escalation patterns and predictive threat signals, giving surveillance staff the immediate context they need to prioritize alerts and intervene before situations spiral out of control.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

Public safety video intelligence is a large and growing B2B/government market — law enforcement, transit, critical infrastructure. CJIS compliance signals serious government/law enforcement ICP. The shift from passive surveillance to proactive AI alerting is a well-funded vertical with real enterprise and municipal budgets. TAM easily exceeds $1B+ when including federal, state, and local law enforcement plus private security.

Medium Signal

Founder Signal

Srihan Balaji has relevant but short experience: 8 months as Applied Research Scientist at Lockheed Martin doing RL for VLMs in TS/SCI environments, and 4 months at AWS on drone classification — both directly relevant but very brief tenures. Abhisheik Sharma is a current Georgia Tech CS student (graduating ~2026) with NLP research published in an ACL journal and an internship at Verisign — impressive academic credentials but limited industry experience. Both founders are early-career; no prior exits.

Low Signal

Competition

No competitor data was found in research, but this space is crowded: Axon (they reference Axon Body 4 cameras), Motorola Solutions (Avigilon), Palantir, Flock Safety, and dozens of AI video analytics startups (Verkada, BriefCam, Genetec) all compete here. Big incumbents have deep government relationships and compliance certifications already. Differentiation on 'live-only processing' and NLP-backed sentiment analysis is interesting but unproven against entrenched players.

Medium Signal

Product

Website shows feature descriptions (precision detection, live descriptor search, sentiment analysis, CJIS compliance) with mock UI screenshots and a demo request CTA. No named customers, revenue metrics, or live demo access visible. The product appears technically specified but unproven in the market — no press coverage, no testimonials, no named deployments.

OverallC Tier

Protent is two early-career founders — one fresh from short stints at Lockheed and AWS, one still a college student — building in an intensely competitive and compliance-heavy market dominated by Axon, Motorola, and Palantir. The technical direction is credible (RL for video intelligence, NLP sentiment analysis, CJIS compliance) and the government/law enforcement market is real money, but there is zero evidence of paying customers, named pilots, or revenue. The 'live-only processing' angle is a genuine product differentiator that could be compelling to privacy-sensitive buyers, but winning law enforcement contracts as an unknown startup with no track record is a long, slow, expensive sales cycle. Founders need a lighthouse customer badly to prove this isn't vaporware.

Active Founders

Srihan Balaji

Co-Founder & CEO

Ex-Lockheed Martin Research & AWS. Deployed RL-optimized video intelligence in classified environments; currently building the intelligence layer for proactive public safety.

Abhisheik Sharma

Co-Founder & CTO

Previous NLP and sentiment analysis researcher. Now building the video intelligence layer that surfaces threats in real-time.

Protent

TierC Tier

BatchWinter 2026

Team Size2

StatusActive

LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA