In March 2021, a group calling itself Arson Cats spent about 36 hours inside Verkada's network. The company sold cameras to hospitals, gyms and offices, and now it was the story. Early reports spoke of footage from more than 150,000 cameras. Later reporting put it at 95 customers.
Filip Kaliszan was the CEO who had to explain it. He had grown up in Poland, by his own account, and one speaker bio says he was raised in Paris. At Stanford he studied computer science and, as a sophomore, started a company with two classmates, James Ren and Benjamin Bercovitz. It was called CourseRank, a site to help students choose classes. Chegg bought it in 2010.
He had grown up in Poland, by his own account, and one speaker bio says he was raised in Paris.
After that Kaliszan worked in product roles at Guidebook and Chegg. The itch for something physical came later. In 2016 the three Stanford friends founded Verkada with Hans Robertson, a former COO of Meraki, the company that had made networking gear manageable from the cloud. The pitch was Meraki's trick applied to cameras: no recorder in a closet, no server to patch.
The first install was modest. In 2017 the team put its cameras in an Equinox gym in Beverly Hills. Then came money. A $40 million Series B in April 2019 valued the company at $540 million, and eight months later a Felicis-led round made it $1.6 billion. In spring 2020 it added door access, and in the pandemic it offered free surveillance kits.
Then the breach. It tested the thing a security company sells, which is trust. Kaliszan announced a bug bounty, red and blue team exercises, mandatory two-factor for support staff and better audit logs for customers. The company did not stall. A $305 million round in October 2023 valued it at $3.2 billion, and by December 2025 CapitalG led $100 million at $5.8 billion. Wikipedia lists revenue of $806 million for 2025 and about 30,000 customers.
What the sources do not give is much about Kaliszan's early life beyond his own few lines, and it would be dishonest to fill the gap. What they do show is a pattern: a team that started in a dorm-era project, sold it, and then stayed together for a second company. Co-founders who have already survived a first exit know how the other one behaves when things go wrong, and in 2021 that mattered.