GardaWorld’s ECAM Emerges From Strategic Merger of Live Monitoring Leaders
When GardaWorld announced the launch of ECAM in April, it marked the culmination of more than a year of strategic repositioning that included the acquisition of Stealth Monitoring and the continued development of the ECAMSECURE brand. Both businesses bring complimentary strengths in live video surveillance and now operate together under the ECAM name, which, according to the company, has the largest monitored footprint of mobile and fixed surveillance units in North America.
Though financial terms of the Stealth Monitoring acquisition were not officially disclosed, industry observers — including a report by Deep Sentinel — estimate the deal may have been valued between $500 million and $750 million, based on Stealth’s reported recurring revenue exceeding $100 million. Around the same time, GardaWorld completed a $1 billion senior notes offering, with proceeds allocated toward the acquisition and other corporate initiatives. The investment signaled GardaWorld’s strategic intent to expand its position in AI-enabled remote video surveillance and integrate Stealth’s capabilities into a broader security platform.
But ECAM’s ambition isn’t merely to scale. The company’s leadership sees a larger opportunity: to redefine how modern surveillance is delivered, blending proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and seasoned personnel into a model that’s as agile as it is intelligent.
“Every camera, always monitored” is more than a catchphrase at the Dallas-based company. According to Chief Operating Officer Chris Brooks, it’s a rallying cry for a team working to blend AI and human expertise into a seamless hybrid security model.
“We’re not just talking about AI or just service,” Brooks said. “From day one, we built this business around three pillars: hardware, technology and service. Each is just as critical as the other.”
A blended approach to customer needs
Brooks emphasized ECAM’s flexibility in tailoring deployments to meet the distinct demands of customers, from multifamily housing to logistics and commercial properties. That means not pushing one product over another but leveraging a portfolio that includes both mobile surveillance units (MSUs) and permanent camera installations.
“It allows us to be nimble,” he explained. “For a construction site, we may deploy a mobile trailer. For a property with existing infrastructure, we might integrate directly with hardwired cameras. The key is not forcing a fit but designing the right solution.”
That customer-centric model is especially important as more end users seek proactive, not reactive, video monitoring services. ECAM’s internal mantra of playing offense rather than defense reflects a strategic pivot across the surveillance space. The goal is to prevent incidents before they escalate — or better yet, before they occur at all.
AI at the edge, humans in the loop
At the core of ECAM’s strategy is a proprietary AI engine developed in-house over more than a decade. Brooks credited CTO Alex Vourkoutiotis and his team with curating a vast database of annotated footage to train ECAM’s detection models. The result: three layers of AI applied to every camera feed.
Unlike some commercial solutions that rely on off-the-shelf AI, ECAM’s platform dynamically adapts based on environmental conditions and site-specific variables. “Our AI doesn’t just flag motion,” Brooks noted. “It learns which behaviors matter on each site.”
Still, Brooks was quick to stress that AI alone isn’t the endgame. While automation improves response speed and reduces false positives, human operators remain central to decision-making.
“AI helped us remove the noise, so our teams could focus on what really matters. It didn’t replace our people; it made them more effective.”
Interestingly, rather than reducing headcount, AI deployments have actually increased workload. By filtering out false positives and surfacing more actionable events, the system has enabled more real-time interventions, dispatches and apprehensions that require human follow-up.
Merging operations, building culture
The merger of ECAMSECURE and Stealth Monitoring presented both opportunity and complexity. Each legacy company had its own processes, systems and culture.
“We were once competitors,” Brooks said. “Now we’re one team. And the overlap in strengths made integration easier than you might think.”
ECAMSECURE brought manufacturing expertise and mobile unit capabilities. Stealth Monitoring brought structure, process discipline and strength in fixed-site monitoring. Together, the combined company adopted a regional operational model across five U.S. territories to stay close to customers.
Today, all sites feed into a unified platform with shared ticketing, health monitoring and AI tools. “Every camera goes through the same customer journey now,” Brooks said. “That consistency matters.”
Communication was critical in the integration process, Brooks added. “We didn’t try to rush it. We kept the dialogue open and led with pride in what each group had built.”
Educating the market
As AI-enabled surveillance becomes more mainstream, ECAM sees growing confusion around what these systems actually deliver. Brooks noted that many customers conflate live monitoring with event-based alerting, or assume that AI alone is sufficient to protect a site. This disconnect often stems from the influx of new entrants and overlapping offerings in the marketplace.
“There’s some brand confusion,” Brooks said. “Not every solution is built the same way, and not every customer fully understands the difference between real-time, proactive monitoring and event-triggered alerts.”
This education gap is something ECAM addresses early in the customer relationship. During onboarding, the company explains how site design, camera configuration and post-install service protocols all contribute to performance.
“Ninety-five percent of our cameras are outdoors, operating in real-world environments: wind, rain, low light, you name it,” Brooks said. “We’re not just flipping on a camera and calling it a day. It’s about designing a system that works under stress.”
The goal, according to Brooks, is to ensure that clients understand the full scope of what makes a deployment successful — not just the technology itself, but the planning and support systems behind it.
Rethinking ROI and risk
So how does ECAM measure success? According to Brooks, it starts with deterrence, such as when potential intruders turn back after a strobe light or audio intervention. But the company also looks at broader outcomes, including fewer incidents, lower third-party costs and improved oversight across customer sites.
Proactive health monitoring, for instance, helps avoid costly service visits and minimizes downtime. ECAM tracks camera uptime, service level agreement (SLA) response windows, and even self-reports to clients when failures occur.
“We hold ourselves accountable. If a camera goes down, we let the customer know and tell them when it's coming back up. That transparency is part of the trust we build,” Brooks said.
For larger accounts, ECAM conducts quarterly business reviews where the team shares not only performance highlights — such as successful deterrents and arrests — but also areas where it believes improvement is needed. These sessions include open discussions of service disruptions, response delays or misconfigurations, and how the company plans to address them.
ECAM also uses these moments as internal teaching tools. “Certainly there’s a human element to what we do, and sometimes human error comes into play,” Brooks acknowledged. “But we always work on proactive ways to train and retrain our folks to make sure they're making the best decisions.”
Another key metric is what ECAM calls “offensive plays” — a running tally of actions like dispatches, talk-down interventions and arrests that demonstrate the system’s active role in threat mitigation. These not only reflect field effectiveness, but also help customers quantify the return on their security investment.
“Every time we can prevent something from happening, that's peace of mind for our customer — and that’s ROI,” Brooks said.
What’s Next?
Asked how he envisions surveillance evolving over the next three to five years — particularly when it comes to AI and integration with physical and digital systems — Brooks pointed to several areas of active development. For example, ECAM is eyeing deeper integration with public safety networks, fire departments and emergency services to share situational awareness in real time. There’s also growing interest in environmental risk monitoring — from wildfire detection to flood alerts — as a natural extension of surveillance infrastructure.
Predictive analytics is another frontier. Brooks envisions a future where AI systems move beyond detection into behavior forecasting. “We’re good at seeing what’s happening,” he said. “But if we can anticipate what’s about to happen, we can stop even more threats before they start.”
While fully autonomous surveillance may be years away, ECAM’s hybrid model shows that blending technology with trained human insight remains a powerful formula for real-world protection.
“We work in the shadows, in the worst conditions,” Brooks said. “And we’re proud of how far we’ve come in turning those challenges into advantages.”
