Founder Spotlight: Simon Randall

Simon Randall is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pimloc, a deep tech start-up whose all-in-one privacy and intelligence platform - Secure Redact - provides world-leading, automated audio and video redaction software, with advanced multimodal capabilities for review, discovery, chain of custody and analytics.  

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How did you get interested in your sector initially?

The inspiration for Pimloc grew out of a previous business where we pioneered the development (and manufacturing/sales) of the world's first intelligent wearable camera - Autographer.

After launching the camera into the world, we learned 3 things:

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The world does not need more cameras! The world is going to have more cameras than it knows what to do with - there’s going to be low cost, internet-connected cameras deployed everywhere.

The technical challenge to solve for is the ‘wall of death’, (what we called being faced with all the data from a camera that autonomously captures images and video for days at a time). The challenge was not capturing the data, but how to efficiently process and extract the moments that matter from it.

An immutable privacy layer is needed to underpin the growth of always-on livestream data, so that data can be captured and used. Security and Privacy can no longer be seen as opposite ends of a continuum, they will have to co-exist together.

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For these reasons, we setup Pimloc and started developing Secure Redact.

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How has your technology progressed since company inception to today?

In the very early days we were creating a privacy-led image and video search system, to make large collections and live streams accessible for search and investigation. After exploring a range of use cases, we focused on solving the challenges associated with high accuracy detection of PII and other sensitive data in CCTV footage, for the purposes of selective anonymisation. The challenge was building a system that was performant across all types of CCTV footage - varying camera angles, varying camera hardware, scenes, lighting - so that it could quickly and accurately allow a person or object to be fully redacted in every frame of a video.

We then started processing lots of moving camera footage - from body-worn cameras, dash-cams, drones and smartphone - which creates more technical challenges as the camera and subjects are both moving continuously, especially in the case of body-worn video. These challenges have resulted in a patent pending that helps with the tracking of moving objects captured on moving cameras.

These new camera formats can also capture audio, so Secure Redact has expanded to include audio redaction for video, and also now standalone audio files. With capabilities now covering ingest, transcription, translation, redaction and editing.

The proprietary technology behind Secure Redact’s tracking and re-identification solutions for anonymisation (i.e. redact everyone except for the Subject through this video) is also now used to support investigative workflows needed to search within and across large video files and streams.

Secure Redact is now a fully-featured privacy and intelligence platform, supported by Enterprise workflows with strong chain-of-custody governance for the management and redaction of multimedia.

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What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since launching the company?

For some use cases, like ours, automation solutions need to perform to an extremely high level of accuracy, across an extremely variable corpus of real-world security footage - in order to genuinely save time for users.

Normal-level automation performance can actually make some tasks take longer, as users have to spend more time reviewing and correcting false positives and negatives, so it ends up taking more time overall than if a user had just done everything manually to start with.

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Any new hires that you are excited to announce?

We have recently appointed our new Chair to the board, Kelly Richdale, someone who is well placed to support Pimloc through its next phases of global growth.

We are also currently building out our US team to support our growing partnership endeavours and further expansion.

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As you reflect on your fundraising activities, what do you look for most in an investor?

Sector and strategic fit, practical and honest (no BS) - real value outside of money. Which firm and partner/s are going to give Pimloc the best chance of the best outcomes.

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Which geographies will you be focusing on most moving forward, and how do you plan on retaining your lead in an increasingly competitive and crowded market?

To date we’ve been heavily focused on the UK, but we are now expanding focus into the US and wider EU.

Pimloc’s magic comes from the deep coupling of our underlying automation solutions with our powerful user application tools and workflows. Both re-enforce each other, allowing all users to complete their redaction and discovery tasks, no matter how complex or bespoke their requirements. Whether they are law enforcement officers, insurance claims handlers, school security managers, transport compliance officers or production teams sharing breaking news content - our privacy and intelligence platform can meet most sectors’ needs, yet still be specific and tailorable to each organisation’s use cases.

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What are the main sectors and use cases you are seeing in the market

Secure Redact is used extensively in Public Safety, Transport, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail, Schools and content creation.

On the public sector side, it supports the preparation of multimedia data for freedom of information and right of access requests, and on the private sector side its used to support privacy compliance for GDPR across UK/Europe and HIPAA, FERPA and other legislation for the protection of PII, PHI (personal health information), children and students data, and other sensitive classes of information captured within audio and video.

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How do you see your product giving an edge to allied National Security?

Secure Redact’s high-performance system provides fine-grained security for the protection of more sensitive data, so that data can be used and shared more widely.

It fosters greater data sharing and usage across teams, whilst protecting personal and sensitive information elements.

Whilst the data in question varies across domains, the use cases, requirements and underlying technology are the same. Pimloc has equal focus on public safety use cases alongside supporting security and compliance teams in the private sector.

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Where do you see the business in 5 years?

We are building the privacy and intelligence layer for audio and video - in 5 years, Secure Redact will be the go-to platform across the market.

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Find out more: https://www.pimloc.com

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About MD One Ventures:

Founded in 2021 as Europe's first National Security specialist VC, MD One Ventures is a Venture Capital firm, investing in Pre- Seed to Series A National Security technology companies.

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