Filip Kaliszan

CEO & Co-Founder Verkada

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Filip Kaliszan is CEO and co-founder of Verkada, which sells cameras, alarms, access control and sensors joined under one cloud-managed software platform — an attempt to do for building security what cloud networking did for the wiring closet. He founded it in 2016 with two Stanford friends, James Ren and Benjamin Bercovitz, and with Hans Robertson, who had co-founded and run operations at Meraki and now chairs Verkada’s board. The company’s pitch has always been that physical security hardware felt a generation behind consumer technology; Kaliszan’s own account of winning Sequoia’s backing in 2019 is that he brought a camera to the meeting and set it up. By December 2025 Verkada was valued at $5.8 billion on a round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG, with more than $1 billion in annualised bookings across 30,000 customers and over two million devices deployed.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Verkada in 2016 with James Ren, Benjamin Bercovitz and Hans Robertson; named CEO and co-founder on the company’s own About page as of September 2026.
• Reached a $5.8 billion valuation in December 2025 on a $100 million round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture capital arm — Kaliszan told CNBC that Google “saw the opportunity with us in the application of AI… to the physical security industry.”
• Grew the company to more than $1 billion in annualised bookings, 30,000 customers, 2 million-plus deployed devices and 17 offices across the Americas, EMEA and JAPAC.
• Raised through Series B ($40M at $540M, 2019), Series C ($80M at $1.6B, 2020), Series D ($305M at $3.2B, 2023) and Series E ($200M at $4.5B, February 2025).
• Co-founded CourseRank as a Stanford sophomore with the same two classmates and sold it to Chegg within four years, then spent about four years as a director of product management there.
• Oversaw the release of more than 60 new AI features and platform updates in September 2025.

Professional Journey

Kaliszan’s first company began as a student annoyance. As a Stanford sophomore he and Benjamin Bercovitz and James Ren built CourseRank because selecting courses meant working from a printed book. He has called it an “incidental startup” — the value of it was less the product than learning how a founding team divides work. CourseRank sold to Chegg less than four years after it was built, and Kaliszan stayed on there for roughly four years as a director of product management.

Verkada followed in 2016, founded in Menlo Park with the same two CourseRank co-founders plus Hans Robertson, whose credibility in cloud-managed hardware came from co-founding Meraki and serving as its chief operating officer before Cisco acquired it. The insight Kaliszan describes is domestic rather than industrial: consumer home cameras had become good, cheap and easy, while the cameras protecting offices, schools and transport hubs had not. His photography background and his Stanford coursework in systems and design both fed into a product that had to be as approachable as a consumer device while being managed at enterprise scale.

Sequoia partnered in 2019, and its account of the first meeting is characteristic of how the company sells: rather than a deck, Kaliszan set up a camera and let the hardware argue. At that point Verkada was a fifteen-person team in a San Francisco space that was half office and half warehouse. The funding then escalated quickly — $40 million at a $540 million valuation in April 2019, $80 million at $1.6 billion in January 2020, $305 million at $3.2 billion in October 2023, $200 million at $4.5 billion in February 2025 and, in December 2025, $100 million from CapitalG at $5.8 billion.

That growth has not been without incident. In March 2021 attackers held access to Verkada’s network for roughly 36 hours and obtained video and image data belonging to 95 customers; earlier reporting in 2020 revealed that members of male leadership had used the company’s own facial recognition to harass female colleagues, which led to dismissals; and in September 2024 the Department of Justice sued over CAN-SPAM Act violations, settled for $2.95 million. Kaliszan has led the company through each of these while continuing to raise at rising valuations.

The current strategic bet is artificial intelligence applied to physical security — more than sixty AI features shipped in September 2025, and a CapitalG investment thesis that turns on it. Kaliszan’s own framing is deliberately bounded: “humans will be providing security to other humans for as long as I can think,” he told CNBC, but AI can give first responders situational awareness they would not otherwise have.

Education

Stanford University

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science (systems focus)

Stanford University

Master’s degree, Human-Computer Interaction