Athena Security: Combating weapon violence one detection at a time

Eve Goode, Digital Content Editor of Security Journal Americas hears exclusively from Lisa Falzone, President and Co-Founder of Athena Security.

Throughout the article, Falzone touches on the founding of Athena Security and what inspired her to push for better weapon detection systems across the states.

She also delves into the suitability of Athena’s solutions and why they are beneficial in environments such as hospitals and schools. 

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how your experiences led you to founding Athena security?

I started my first company Revel Systems back in 2010, where I created the first enterprise iPad point of sale solution for brick and motor commerce.

By 2017, we had grown the company to 800 employees and we then received a half a billion-dollar evaluation, which led us to sell the company to private equity in February 2017.

After this, I retired for a little bit and took a break from my work as I wanted to do something a little more altruistic.

I was really disturbed by what was going on in the news with all the school shootings at the time and I wanted to create some technology to minimize the risks of weapon related violence.  

AI had just made a lot of advancements in computer vision, so we wanted to create technology to help stop some of these school shootings that were happening using AI.

Our first product was a visual light weapon detection that detects when someone pulls out a weapon and then sends an alert to whoever the client wants, whether it’s a security officer or someone else, depending on how they set the system up.

Through doing this, we realized that people were saying things like “Oh, that’s great that you can help to improve response times, but you’re not preventing the actual crime.”

After this, we noticed how individuals and companies were on the hunt for concealed weapon detection, so in 2022 we pivoted to doing concealed weapon detection for entry ways, including both the hardware and the software solution.

The solution runs as two poles and an open gate and then we combine two iPads and our software around it, this system is used to detect when someone comes in with a weapon, whether it is hidden or not.

It’s sort of like next generation metal detection because it still lets through keys and cell phones, but it alerts the user if there is a handgun or another weapon.  

What was it that encouraged you to co-found Athena?

I had just had two children and I was thinking about when I would have to start putting them in school and I was just really disturbed about what was going on in in the news with the number of school shootings that were occurring.

This pushed me to want to help protect my children as well as all the children that are concerned and effected by school shootings every day.

So that’s kind of how we started and what the genesis of the company was.

Can you tell me about a time where Athena’s deployment has been successfully deployed?

Our biggest vertical is healthcare and emergency rooms. I didn’t realize this, but every day, nurses and doctors are being assaulted in healthcare environments.

We stopped over 1000 weapons a month from entering healthcare environments.

Although we focus on the safety of the staff, we also focus a lot on the safety of the people inside the hospital like patients and visitors.

Occasionally, we do get an alert of a domestic violence case between patients or between visitors of the hospital, however, the solution in healthcare buildings is usually monitoring individuals entering the building and bringing in concealed weapons.

Our solution works by detecting the weapon and allowing for intervention before the individual is able to enter the building, so this is one example of how our solution is helping to make places safer.

Do you think that healthcare environments are the most suitable for Athena’s solution, or are there other environments that would benefit more?

I know there’s definitely other verticals that benefit from our solution but the biggest uptake is in healthcare.

The healthcare locations that we provide security for are very concerned about data and they want to be informed about how many weapons are entering the building every day.

They are very big on process and controls.

At Athena, we understand the value and importance of recording this data.

To answer your question, other verticals that would benefit from Athena’s solution includes schools, casinos, churches, jewellery stores and any location that wants to be protected from concealed weapons entering its buildings.

How has Athena evolved in recent years? Have you launched any new innovative products?

I think that Athena is really on the cutting edge of innovation.

We’ve recently come out with a lot of new, innovative products where we have really listened to the wants and needs of our clients.

We noticed that a lot of officers would get distracted and miss when a weapon entered the Incident Response window, so we then developed AR glasses that allowed officers – even when distracted – to be notified about weapons entering the protected building, through an alarm that alerts the officers through the glasses themselves. 

We developed the glasses solution to ultimately keep officers safer and allow them to nearly never miss an alert.

Athena aims to keep developing innovative products that our clients actually want and need to keep on top of trends.

Can you tell me a little bit about your leadership style and how your experiences of being a woman in security has helped shape this?

My experiences of being a woman in security helped me to shape the company from day one.

The company is named Athena because she is the goddess of wisdom and protection, so I felt that I relate personally to the Goddess Athena through her architype and personality type.

So that is one of the reasons we named the company Athena Security.

I think that in security industries specifically, it is a very male dominated field.

In the industry though, we are looking for partners for security innovation and personally I think that often comes from an outsider perspective.

I’m not sure that me being a woman also plays into this, but I think the stance I bring is different in terms of my perspective and how I look at things compared to more traditional views in a male-leading field.

If you could give a piece of advice to somebody that wants to start their career in the security industry, what would the one piece of advice be?

When you’re selling security, you’re selling trust and I think that some startups have to take a ‘fake it till you make it’ approach, which is really popular in Silicon Valley, but that really does not work within the security industry.

Clients and customers do not just want to see your vision, they want to see what you have and what you are selling so, sell what you have and do not use the ‘fake it till you make it’ approach, that’s the advice I would give!

To view Athena Security’s website, please click here.