Pax, an AI-native public safety company, announced that it has closed a $40 million fundraising round. The round was jointly led by leading Silicon Valley venture funds Greenoaks and Benchmark, indicating huge faith of investors in the ability of AI to upend public infrastructure and the police.
The big funding round followed an unparalleled proof of concept deployment. As the company has reported, Pax’s live intelligence platform reduced violent crime by 27% after just six months of its largest municipal rollout.
A Data-Driven Cure for an Epidemic of Violence
The protection of public safety is, to this day, an extremely high-stakes problem in Latin America, where violence is one of the most pressing social and economic problems. According to calculations by the Inter-American Development Bank, crime and violence represented a drain of some 3.5% of regional gross domestic product, causing a regional loss of about $241 billion. In Brazil, where Pax is now testing its technology, an average of 40,000 murders are registered annually; only 39% are theoretically ever investigated to a conclusion.
Source: Pax
Pax’s founding team assert that this systemic failure is not due to a lack of effort by officers but simply amounts to a massive fragmentation of data.
David Peixoto, CEO and founder of Pax AI, has experienced scaling enormous businesses in Brazil before, from edtech titans like Arco, which he grew to become the first Brazilian company to list on the Nasdaq. To grow Pax, Peixoto recruited a world-class engineering team, drawing engineers from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Brazil’s best schools, ITA and USP.
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How the Pax Intelligence Graph Works
Pax is used as a single intelligence layer plugged into the current physical infrastructure. It does not demand any new, high-cost hardware; instead, it uses thousands of municipal security and state security cameras already on the street.
Once the data enters the system, Pax ML machine learning systems convert these separate points – a vehicle model, a partial plate, a location, and an incident report – into a dynamic intelligence graph. Then, if said car hits a camera associated with an armed robbery, an instant alert would be sent to the following officers, showing the most probable path.
It’s changing the way local police work. In addition to reducing violent crime by 27%, police forces working with Pax have already cracked over 2,000 difficult criminal cases in 30 cities, covering everything from homicide and carjacking to theft rings. Most importantly, Pax more than doubled police productivity while increasing perceived neighbourhood safety by 59%.
Addressing the Ethics of AI Policing
Supporters of civil liberty across the world have raised many concerns about the dangers of AI in policing, including structural concerns over the development of a biased and disproportionate algorithmic system, as well as the development of a kind of surveillance state that is invasive and permanent in nature. Pax has explicitly shown how the friction points can be mitigated by accommodating strong safeguards directly into the software platform.
The platform provides an absolute audit trail. Every database query, video search, and alert interaction gets individually written to an indisputable, authorised, declared operator tied to it. Peixoto also insisted the tool is a silent analytical copilot, not an automaton. ‘The tool doesn’t execute; it researches. ‘The officer researches; the officer executes,’ Peixoto said. ‘The platform merely multiplies their awesomeness.’
Given its infusion of $40 million of new capital, the company is planning an aggressive expansion beyond its original 30 Brazilian cities in order to take its real-time intelligence platform to the wider Latin American region.
