Our History

The origins of Sighthound start in 1989, when our CEO (Jonathan) and President (Ryan) were rivals in a high-school programming competition. Ryan’s team won. Jonathan recovered, found Ryan again in 1994, and they co-founded IRdg in 1995.

In 1997 the IRdg founders sold their company to MediaGate and moved to Silicon Valley. There they met Sighthound’s VP of Platform Engineering, Alex. In 1999 they found Sighthound’s Chief Architect (Markus) online in Germany and asked him to move to California to start a new company, Voxeo.

Jonathan, Ryan, Alex, Markus and many others joined the founding team at Voxeo. Voxeo grew to be an industry powerhouse in telecommunications and speech recognition. Voxeo acquired 11 other companies, and was then acquired by Aspect Software in 2013 for $150 million - but not before the Voxeo founders spun out a new company (Tropo) which was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for close to $100 million. The team owned >80% of both companies when they sold.

In 2013, a new team - with people from IRdg, MediaGate, and Voxeo - came together to start Sighthound. Zain, a smart, hardworking entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in Computer Vision, joined them. They acquired another company, “Vitamin D”, and Sighthound was born.

Sighthound was created by Alex, Markus, Jonathan, Ryan, Zain and many others to make computer vision easy and valuable. Sighthound was also built on a best practice learned over the prior 20 years: if you make your customers exceptionally happy, they tend to buy more things from you. Ten years later, Sighthound customers include hundreds of companies, over five hundred law enforcement entities, and over 200,000 end-users.

In 2021 SIghthound acquired Boulder AI and a whole new team of great people joined Sighthound. Boulder AI’s hardware solutions provide Sighthound with the unique opportunity to serve our customers with their hardware and personalized computer vision software needs.

The Sighthound team would love to help make Computer Vision a happy (and valuable) experience for you, too.

Postscript:

  1. Our fellow team members past and present go by different names: Voxeo “Voxeons”, Tropo “Troponauts” and Sighthound “Hounds”.

  2. Many, many Voxeons, Troponauts, and Hounds were part of starting and growing each company. While we don’t have enough room here to tell your part of our history here, the full history is very much in our hearts and minds.

  3. Many Voxeons and Troponauts are at Cisco, Aspect, and other companies; we hope to one day work with all of you again.

  4. You may have heard of the PayPal Mafia. At least six other startups were born and are being raised by Voxeons and Troponauts. While not a mafia, we do refer to this effect as the “Voxeo Book Club”. Not quite as powerful (yet) as the PayPal team… but very well read. Very well read indeed.

  5. The WOPPR systems pictured above ran the VCS platform, but the MCP had been retired. At Sighthound, our platform is called SIO (Sighthound IO), where we are also building a new MCP. In all pictures, NSMA still applies.