Steve Van Till

Founder & President Brivo

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Steve Van Till founded Brivo in 1999 on a bet that has since become the industry’s default assumption: that commercial access control — who can open which door, and when — belongs in the cloud rather than in a panel in a basement. He was early enough that the words SaaS and IoT did not yet apply to the category, and he led the company as chief executive for more than twenty-five years, through Dean Drako’s outright purchase of it in 2015 and up to its merger with Drako’s Eagle Eye Networks at the end of 2025. Since that merger he has been president of the combined company, which retains the Brivo name and pairs cloud access control with cloud AI video surveillance. Alongside the operating career he has been one of the industry’s more visible public figures: an ASIS Book of the Year author, a Security Industry Hall of Fame inductee, a patent holder, and chairman of the Security Industry Association’s Standards Committee.

Career Highlights

• Founded Brivo in 1999 and built the first cloud- and SaaS-delivered commercial access control business; by 2015 it served more than six million users across over 100,000 access points.
• Served as Brivo’s chief executive for over two decades, continuing in the role after Dean Drako acquired the company outright for $50 million in June 2015.
• Became president of the merged Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks business announced on 30 December 2025, with Drako as chief executive.
• Inducted into the SSI Security Industry Hall of Fame and awarded the Security Industry Association’s Lippert Memorial Award in 2019.
• Wrote “The Five Technological Forces Disrupting Security”, named ASIS International Book of the Year for 2017, and holds multiple patents in physical access control and surveillance.
• Received the Jay Hauhn Excellence in Partnerships Award in 2017 and was named an IFSEC Top Influencer in 2022.
• Appointed to the Secure Building Council Advisory Board in August 2026, and led Brivo AI Week from 27 to 31 July 2026.

Professional Journey

Van Till’s pre-Brivo career, as recorded by business databases rather than by any primary source, ran through satellite communications and then through the first internet wave: software development leadership at Geostar, systems engineering at Comsat, a directorship at the healthcare information company HCIA, and internet consulting at Sapient. It is a background in connecting distributed systems over networks, which is exactly the problem he would later apply to door locks.

He founded Brivo in 1999. The insight was that an access control system is fundamentally a database and a set of permissions, and that there was no good reason for either to live on premises. Delivering it as a hosted service meant a building owner could manage credentials across a portfolio from anywhere, and that the system could be updated centrally rather than visited. That was an unusual argument to make to a conservative industry in 1999; it took the better part of two decades for the market to agree, and by the time it did Brivo had scale — over six million users and more than 100,000 managed access points by 2015.

That year brought the company’s first change of ownership. Dean Drako, who had founded Barracuda Networks and then Eagle Eye Networks, acquired Brivo outright for $50 million in June 2015, months after the two companies had announced a strategic alliance to integrate access control with cloud video. Drako became chairman; Van Till stayed on as president and chief executive, and the operating leadership was unchanged.

The logic of that ownership played out ten years later. On 30 December 2025 Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks announced they would merge, creating what Drako described as the world’s largest AI-powered cloud-native physical security company, operating under the Brivo name. Drako took the chief executive role of the combined business and Van Till became president — the founder moving from running the company to leading it alongside the person who had owned it for a decade.

He has stayed publicly active in the merged company and in the industry. He led Brivo AI Week in late July 2026, a virtual programme on practical applications of AI in physical security, and in August 2026 was appointed to the Advisory Board of the Secure Building Council, a nonprofit behind SHIELD, a physical security certification programme for building owners, architects and contractors. He chairs the Security Industry Association’s Standards Committee and sits on its board, and continues to write and speak on IoT, mobile credentials and cloud access control.

Education

No education record could be established from a named source. The previous version of this profile asserted a BA and MA in philosophy from Calvin University and incomplete doctoral study in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park; both trace to aggregator records and appear on neither his own biography nor any company or industry page consulted, so they have been removed pending a primary source.