CES Exclusive Interview: SimpliSafe CEO Christian Cerda

This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Security Business magazine. Feel free to share, and please don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter.

I will still say that with all of that, we should do a lot more. And this is where Active Guard comes in. Through this outdoor ring of protection, we want to prevent a crime before it happens. So it goes beyond the false alarm. We don't want the intrusion to happen. As a household, for sure, it's better to have an alarm than not have it, but you really don't want to be in your bedroom with a bad person already inside your home or at the front door.

We launched this product this summer and we are seeing some incredible outcomes – people with a crowbar in their hands that are caught by our AI and then intervened by our human agents, and they drop the crowbar run. Over this holiday break, we caught someone breaking into a car outside of a home. We have seen people carrying the ladders to [access] the second floor, and then dropping the ladders and running. So we are seeing real cases of how this technology is keeping people safe way beyond what traditional technology was able to.

I've heard in the past that there isn't a lot of appetite for this type of system among residential users. Is it because of price? Or do you totally disagree?

Cerda: The need to feel safe is a fundamental need, and I think all of your readers and listeners who are part of the industry would know that the consumer need is there and is bigger than it has ever been. So absolutely. Once through innovation, we can bring the solution at affordable prices, people absolutely want to be more secure.

I know SimpliSafe runs an in-house monitoring center, and it take a lot of manpower to monitor at this level. You are really embracing AVS-01 in that regard. Do you think AI can enhance AVS-01?

Cerda: I think AVS-01 is a great thing for the industry and we fully support it. I think that there are two key drivers to how we were able to offer this service at 49.99 per month. The first one is AI and how AI will significantly transform the security industry – opening solutions and use-cases that were absolutely not possible before. The depth of technology that you need to have in order to make this happen is quite meaningful, and I think it will continue to open this breach between the providers that have the depth of technologies and the ones that do not.

The other thing that has enabled us to deliver this – and for us it has been quite hard – I cannot even imagine how someone or we would've pulled it off without a full vertical integration. We design our own cameras. We work on the type and quality of the AI that lives at the edge. We write that firmware. We design our own video services, the speed of them. We have our own AI teams that do the modeling both at the edge and in the cloud. Then we run our own monitoring center. Because we can align all this tech stack under a single objective, that is how we have been able to do it.

Most of our competitors buy the hardware from one person, has the video with a second one, has an alarm with a third, and a monitoring center with a fourth, Philosophically here [we use] the same approach as Tesla – they build the AI, they build the software, and they build the car. They also believe you can't pull it off by buying the AI and then building the car. We have a similar philosophy – in order to pull it off, we need to find a solution coordinating all the different layers.

As far as AI and monitoring goes, in the industry as a whole, how is AI going to transform monitoring in the future?

Cerda: Our philosophy here is that AI will have two implications. The first one is going to change the cost structure because all of the non-value add [AVS-01 level zero and level one] will be automated. That will open up the creation of new services, like Active Guard, where human agents will still be needed.

I don't envision monitoring centers disappearing. We envision – and this is part of our SimpliSafe philosophy – the integration of technology and people to provide security. Security is transactional and it's emotional; I'm not sure that AI can yet pull off the emotional side, and the complete understanding of what's happening. So there will definitely be roles for humans, for agents, and for monitoring centers, but what they are doing will change drastically.

Talking with many industry leaders, nobody has a crystal ball. Maybe AI will leave all of us without jobs, but our philosophy is that the automation that will transform the industry is absolutely needed, but [that alone] is not sufficient [without human interaction].

Since SimpliSafe came onto the scene, there's been this adversarial relationship between the traditional alarm providers and the DIY providers – SimpliSafe specifically – mainly because there's so much marketing. What role should SimpliSafe take in our industry?

Cerda: I would divide this answer in two. First, I think all brands and teams, we should all compete. We should all try to make ourselves better and push ourselves to win the next customer. I think that is the essence of all of us – we are all trying to gain households, et cetera, and I think it's great and it will push us all to become better.

On the other hand, security is a need and as an industry, we need to pull together to do it better. AVS-01 is an example. We fully support it. The Monitoring Association is another one. We are part of it, and we absolutely support it. Things like automating the signal vs. a phone call... or making sure we are not absorbing too much of the capacity of first responders. We absolutely need to pull together as an industry and serve our customers, our communities, and first responders. We should all be a team there and find common solutions to better take care of the problem that we are solving .

You've mentioned the philosophy of SimpliSafe. If you could put it into words, what would that be?

Cerda: Our mission is to keep every home secure. Our vision is to do it through the integration of expert security agents and technology. Our big difference is our channel of distribution. We sell mostly direct from our website, and I think most of the industry sells door-to-door. But lately, I would say that everyone is merging. Most or all of the traditional competitors have a website. We all have a tele-sales channel.

And a recent change that we have had is we offer professional installation. We do it through a third-party provider, but some customers prefer pro install, and other customers are proficient enough to do the self-install. So there are different type of customers and there are different ways of giving value to them.