Unlocking the Smart Office: Why We Invested in Openpath

We’re excited to announce that we’ve led the Series B investment in Openpath, a company that’s on a mission to modernize the way employees enter and companies secure their offices.

Why did we make this investment? Because we believe that there has to be a better way to enter and secure work.

We’ve all been there. We go to work and realize that we forgot our key card. We knock on the door, wait for someone to buzz us in, or ask the receptionist for help. It’s a waste of time that no one should experience.

Now, contrast that experience with the consumer world. A combination of smart locks and Ring, recently acquired by Amazon for $1B+, has worked to solve this problem for homeowners, making their homes easily accessible and more secure by using technology to detect when someone is at the door.

Coming to work is something that we do every day. Why can’t it be as easy as opening the door to our home? Why does there have to be so much friction involved at work?

Enter Openpath.

Openpath makes coming to work easy. Lock and unlock your door using your phone via its mobile app, using a touchless wave to unlock (simply pass your hand in front of the reader and it will recognize your phone even if it's in a purse or pocket), watch, encrypted card, badge or key fob.

When we first met the Openpath team, we became immediately excited. This founding team - a group that previously co-founded several companies together - has a special chemistry that is rarely seen today. They are an award-winning group of seasoned serial entrepreneurs who have worked together for over 20 years creating and scaling successful businesses, including EdgeCast, KnowledgeBase, Virtualis, Fonality and HostPro. All told, the Openpath founding team, comprised of Alex Kazerani, CEO; James Segil, President; Rob Peters, CTO; Samy Kamkar, Chief Security Officer; and Phil Goldsmith, CRO; have started companies that have created over $500 million in enterprise value as well as thousands of jobs.

Openpath’s patented technology provides the type of high-level security that building management and owners need, with encryption at every level and shields against cloning, sniffing and key copying. Users can easily manage multiple properties from one console, eliminating the costs of local software and servers.

Emergence is a thematic investment firm. We spend a lot of time researching and predicting emerging trends that we believe will fundamentally change the way the world works. One of the areas we’ve invested a lot of time in is the Internet of Things (IoT) and the belief that work should be more connected than it currently is. We’ve been working on this thesis for years, understanding that Access Control was the keystone to unlock the full potential of the Smart Office. We had a strong conviction about what the winning company was going to look like, which needed to be more than just a user friendly mobile app, as the platform, enterprise and security protocols are fundamental for this solution to work and scale. That is why when we met Openpath, we immediately knew that this was the company that was going to disrupt the $6.8B access control industry.

At Emergence, we look to invest in people who change the way the world works. We’re looking forward to partnering with the Openpath team to fundamentally change the way people access and secure their workplace.