Steve Van Till, Founder and President of Brivo, tells Digital Content Editor, Eve Goode, about the company’s merger with Eagle Eye Networks.
Can you introduce yourself and tell me about Brivo?
Brivo was launched in 1999. It is the very first cloud-native physical security access control company that I’m aware of – at the time this was something completely new.
My background has been focused on different kinds of technology including product and software development. I started in satellite communications, building one of the earliest satellite tracking devices called Geostar.
After this, I moved into communications satellites, building remote telephony systems and healthcare information systems.
In the next part of my journey, I did some interesting work in healthcare informatics, converting what had yet to be called “big data systems” – from the old way of distribution on CDs and media – to online distribution. This led me to work in web development for large applications, financial services companies and airlines, to name a few.
This is when I first got together with the co-founders of Brivo and decided to launch this company that was initially designed to protect e-commerce deliveries.
We started by building the Smart Box.
We managed access for homeowners, for businesses and delivery carriers like FedEx and the Postal Service.
Eventually we pivoted that company into commercial access control, as the infrastructure, communication and IoT were similar.
Back in 2000, we thought that we would get more traction quickly by applying the technology that we had developed to a known market that was a good fit. That market was commercial access control.
How did you first meet Dean Drako? What do you remember discussing when you first connected?
Dean (Founder of Eagle Eye Networks and Chairman of Brivo) and I first met back in 2013 at a security industry event. We were both speaking on a panel and seated next to each other on the stage.
We shared some friendly chit-chat before the session started and then continued our conversation afterwards.
As Brivo and Eagle Eye were cloud pioneers, we had a lot to talk about in terms of bringing this tech into the security industry and fighting the battles of on-premises architecture. It is crucial to note that bandwidth in 2013 was more limited than it is today.
Throughout our conversation we talked about how to communicate a value proposition to both the resellers, the channel and the end-users.
Fast forward to now, it’s no secret that recurring revenue has become a central concept to how integrators think about building and sustaining businesses.
Companies were used to seeing this kind of revenue dynamic in the area of intrusion or alarms and it is a little bit surprising that more people weren’t jumping on cloud straight away.
Early adopters realised they could get the same recurring revenue they had already come to enjoy inside of the intrusion field with cloud-based access control and video.
We could see the cloud adoption movement taking off. Dean and I were certainly kindred spirits and had a lot in common from building similar businesses around the same time.
Dean acquired Brivo back in 2015. Why did you decide to keep the companies operating separately until now?
Over the years, we’ve held around seven or eight events and at each one someone from the audience would ask the question, “Why aren’t you one company?” Dean’s answer was always that he wanted each company to remain focused on its core product mission.
Dean had seen companies merge in other technology areas where multiple products had become muddled due to losing focus.
He wanted these two technologies to grow up to their full potential before combining their power.
Why does now feel like the right time to merge?
The market is demanding and, in all honesty, people are more interested in merged platforms than they used to be – particularly in the area of cloud security.
If you go back 10-15 years and look at what was going on with on-premises security then, a lot of old legacy systems had to go through an integration cycle long before cloud was on the rise in this market.
Access control platforms added video at both the product level and at the corporate level through mergers and beyond.
The phenomenon had already happened within the on-premises world quite a while ago. When cloud came into the market, we were all mostly single-product companies.
As the market matured, people started saying, “I love the benefits of the cloud platform, but I wish that I could get all of those different security disciplines in one provider, one application and one mobile platform.” This proved to us that the market was more interested.
When we look back to a year ago, in March 2025, we launched Brivo Security Suite, which was the technical integration of the two platforms. In the first year of the product being available, there has been a 20% crossover between the access and video buyers, meaning 20% of the people that have been new customers in the past year have bought that combination.
We take this as a strong endorsement of the unified platform initiative.
In all our years at Brivo, we’ve never seen a new product get 20% adoption in its first year.
What can the merged company now do that wasn’t perhaps possible when Brivo and Eagle Eye were operating independently?
The product integration is the thing that people tend to focus on, but I think that’s just the most readily visible part.
When we talk to our resellers, some of the things we’ve been hearing for quite a while include: Why do I have to deal with two different salespeople? Why are there two separate support organisations? Why do I get two separate invoices?
Taking a lot of the business friction out of the relationship is one of the things that we could not do as separate companies.
We did it the best we could through making the product offering, partner programs, pricing and discounts similar, but we just couldn’t do it at the same level.
One of the things we’ve been able to do is rationalise our field sales teams, build more backend systems, combine both websites to make a single online store.
Moving forward, improvements for customers will include unifying billing into one invoice and creating one support system for customers.
Brivo and Eagle Eye have always positioned themselves as open platforms. Can you still be unified and open at the same time? How does that work in practice?
Absolutely. If you look at the first four elements of the Brivo Security Suite – which is a unified identity system that stitches together all the different pieces – two of the elements in the system, Brivo Visitor and Brivo Intrusion, are actually third-party services that we’ve brought into the suite.
In the case of a visitor, it’s the Envoy product that we’ve co-branded and, in case of an intruder, it’s the Radionix solution that we’ve brought into the suite.
Although we have combined the companies, we are not cutting off any existing API partners. Eagle Eye brought a number of access integrations and Brivo has been integrated with a number of different video partners over the years.
What we’re now offering customers is one brand, one look and feel, one pane of glass.
But we also want to preserve the ability for people to choose best-of-breed products.
Looking ahead, what does success look like for you now?
One of the things we’re sensitive to is that this isn’t about adding another feature. It’s about people genuinely becoming safer by using the product.
We hear a lot of customer stories where someone says, “I was in this situation, and the system saved my life.” The more feedback we get like this will show success over time.
Another important piece is taking aging system infrastructure and using it to deliver a better tenant experience and a better resident experience.
With the new AI analytics, it expands the utility of the solution and shifts it to something closer to an intelligent agent.
When I look at the market, I think there are going to be a limited number of companies that offer a single product.
As time goes by, the field of single-product offerings will continue to shrink. Companies that fail to find partners, pursue corporate mergers or do deep integrations aren’t going to survive because the value proposition of a unified platform is simply too compelling.
Security companies must provide many services in order to thrive.
