Helping protect people with technology

Founding vision

VOLT AI was founded in the Silicon Valley in 2019, yet its story starts years before when its founders met in the DC area as childhood friends. Egor Olteanu, CEO, was passionate about public safety, and Dmitry Sokolowski, CTO, wanted to use technology to make the world a better place. Together, they wanted to use artificial intelligence to detect and stop violence starting with a Real-time Video Intelligence system designed for security teams who never want to miss an incident again.

Intersection of technology and purpose

Egor and Dmitry first met in the early 2000s as childhood friends. Dmitry went to the University of Maryland to study computer science, while Egor enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Middle East. While deployed, Egor wondered, “How can we give soldiers real-time intel into the potential dangers they’re walking into - make it visual and easy to understand in seconds?”

In 2011, Egor joined Google’s Research and Development department called Google X, which is responsible for self-driving cars, drones, high-altitude balloons, and other special projects. Around the same time, Dmitry began his engineering leadership journey building next-generation products and services for Amazon, Apple, Uber, and Facebook; including Apple Maps and Uber’s Risk Platform that revolutionized AI Risk Management, making Uber safer for riders and drivers. 

One day in April 2018, when Egor and Dmitry were meeting for lunch, just a few miles down Highway 101, someone entered YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California, and opened fire, leaving three Google employees wounded. 

This incident was in the wake of the 2018 Parkland High School shooting a few months earlier, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. A few months before that, the 2017 concert shooting in Las Vegas took the lives of 60 people, and injured 413. The shooting at YouTube struck a personal chord with them, proving that these threats could happen to anyone, anywhere, including friends, family, and co-workers. The same year witnessed an alarming surge in school shootings in the United States, a statistic that weighed especially heavily on Dmitry, now a father of three. 

With their rare combination of military and tech experience, Egor and Dmitry had the opportunity to build a product that would use next-generation technology to help protect people from daily threats including crimes, violence, and medical emergencies. They realized that by using AI, millions of security cameras could be monitored 24/7/365 with the same accuracy and consistency as monitoring a single security camera; reducing mistakes due to fatigue, inattention, or training.

Vision becomes reality

In 2019, Egor and Dmitry founded VOLT AI, a mission-driven tech company that uses AI as a security force multiplier to help protect people and save lives. The product became commercially available in 2022 and has been adopted by Fortune 500 companies, schools, office buildings, and industrial facilities.  

We are VOLT AI, and we are making the world a safer place. To learn more, visit: www.volt.ai.