About Us
Our Mission Statement
Our team has big plans and no shortage of ambition to raise the stakes on how to turn video insights into powerful tools to improve our complex world. Our core values of Customer Obsession, Active Evolution, Unlocked Communication and pride in our Unique Community fuels us to improve each other and personalize our work experience to meet the demands of our customers while having fun.
Our Culture
Over multiple decades and companies, we have learned that the most important product we build is the company itself. Like any good engineers, we sat down and designed what we wanted that product to be like. We live by these values every day. They are not posters or banners we hang on the wall, but in fact values ingrained in our hearts and in our minds.
Customer Obsession
We help our customers succeed by focusing on their needs above all else.
Active Evolution
We work hard to continually improve each other, our products, and our value to our customers.
Unlocked Communications
We will always tear down barriers to communication, collaboration, and success.
Unique Community
We are strong individuals - at our strongest as a team.
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.
Our Leaders
Ryan Campbell
President, Board Member
Ryan has a uniquely diverse leadership background spanning engineering, human resources, network operations, corporate culture, and customer service. Over 14 years at Voxeo, he was Senior Vice President of Engineering, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Culture Officer. At Sighthound, Ryan is responsible for product management including our most important product: an Intentional Culture of high performance and customer obsession. Ryan has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida.
Megan Remy
Chief Operating Officer
Megan is passionate about transformation and the opportunities that come from thinking big while empowering the organization around a common goal – the success of the customer. With a customer-first attitude, Megan plays a key role in empowering the organization with processes, data, and strategic thinking. Her 15+ years’ experience in Software Operations as an End-to-end Revenue Operations Executive, means she is an expert in process efficiency and data-builder for Scale-up Growth, as well as a Change Management ninja.
Jonathan Taylor
Board Chairman, Co-Founder and CEO
Jonathan is a “full stack entrepreneur” and investor who has started seven companies, run six, sold four, and acquired seventeen others. In 1999, Jonathan founded Voxeo with the mission to make phone applications easy to build and deploy. He developed the company into a worldwide, cloud-based, enterprise SaaS platform for automated customer service and sold it to Aspect Software in 2013. In 2012, Jonathan completed the spin-off of Tropo - a real-time communications platform - from Voxeo. Jonathan served as Tropo’s Chairman and sold it to Cisco in 2015.
Markus Hahn
Chief Architect, Co-Founder
Markus brings twenty years of software design and development expertise to Sighthound. He developed his own award-winning encryption solutions before working on development and architecture at, in turn, Voxeo, ZoneLabs, later Checkpoint, and LiveOps. Major areas of interest and specialization are security, concurrency, networking and all things media. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen, Germany.
Zain Masood
Chief Research Officer, Co-Founder
Zain Masood holds a PhD in Computer Science, with emphasis in the field of Computer Vision and Machine Learning, from University of Central Florida (UCF). He has expertise pertaining to action/gesture recognition, object detection, shadow detection/removal, face recognition and computational photography. He currently heads the research department at Sighthound.
John Riley
Board Member
John is an investor, entrepreneur, sales leader and experienced board member who has served on the boards of AdventHealth, Alterna Capital Solutions, The Geneva School, PlanSource, and now Sighthound. John was a Co-Founder of CoAdvantage, ZeroChaos, and their parent company, PlanSource, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2019. Since 2006 John has led Legacy Fund, which invests in private businesses and commercial real estate development opportunities.
Dr. Mubarak Shah
Advisor
Dr. Shah joins Sighthound as an advisor. He is Trustee Chair Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, and the founding director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at UCF. His research interests include video surveillance, visual tracking, human activity recognition, visual analysis of crowded scenes, and video registration. Dr. Shah is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE. He is an editor of an international book series on Video Computing, editor in chief of Machine Vision and Applications journal, and an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys journal
Postscript:
Our fellow team members past and present go by different names: Voxeo “Voxeons”, Tropo “Troponauts” and Sighthound “Hounds”.
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.
Many Voxeons and Troponauts are at Cisco, Aspect, and other companies; we hope to one day work with all of you again.
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.
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.