Firefly Raises $20M Series A for Physical AI Safety

Backup power is an unusually concrete place to find an AI company's ambitions. Firefly builds it into the gateway carrying safety-device signals to its software, putting the ordinary problem of a building losing power inside the company's responsibility for keeping people connected.

The Manhattan startup emerged from stealth on October 20, 2026 with a $20M Series A led by Definition Capital, with significant participation from BoxGroup and continued backing from Susa Ventures. Founded in 2024 by CEO James Batt Buckley and CTO Alex Penn, Firefly combines its own hardware, AI-powered software and existing infrastructure to help organizations understand incidents and coordinate responses.

For education, healthcare and enterprise buyers, that puts the investment behind a practical proposition: make the equipment, information and people already in a building work together more clearly. Firefly's opportunity sits in the handoff between recognizing a problem and organizing the response, where product design becomes part of the work a safety team has to perform.

What Firefly's $20M Series A will support

Firefly says the financing will support new physical AI products, hiring across engineering, machine learning and go-to-market, and expansion in education, healthcare and enterprise organizations. That mix of spending reflects the business the founders have chosen to build. Custom equipment requires engineering effort alongside the software and customer-facing work needed to put a connected system into service.

The investment also extends relationships that predate the public launch. According to the company announcement, this is BoxGroup's third investment in Firefly, while Susa Ventures led its earlier seed round. The disclosed $20M is the Series A amount; the reviewed announcement supplies neither a valuation nor the amounts of the previous investments.

Definition Capital joins that history as the round's lead investor. Teddy Citrin, representing Definition Capital in the announcement, framed the opportunity around combining specialized hardware, existing information and coordinated action. The commercial importance of that combination is easier to understand at the customer site: an institution needs the resulting workflow to make sense to the people carrying out a response.

A safety purchase therefore carries an ongoing relationship with the supplier. Firefly is raising money for the product and the organization around it, with expansion plans that will bring its engineering choices into more local operating environments.

Two founders bring alarms and product design together

James Batt Buckley and Alex Penn arrive at the problem from different parts of the technology business. James Batt Buckley helped grow Verkada's alarms business from K-12 schools into large enterprise settings. Alex Penn spent nearly a decade at Apple, bringing an engineering background to products whose hardware and software had to work together.

Firefly's company page identifies James Batt Buckley as CEO, responsible for product and growth, and Alex Penn as CTO, leading engineering and innovation, including hardware and firmware. Alex Penn earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. James Batt Buckley studied computer science at the University of St Andrews and previously worked at Goldman Sachs.

Their current division of responsibility gives the company a way to address both the physical device and the experience surrounding it. A panic button has to be usable by the person requesting help. The software has to make the event legible to somebody responding, potentially through several communication channels and across different locations.

That is where the design argument becomes commercially useful. A buyer evaluating Firefly is also evaluating how much explanation, configuration and coordination the supplier can absorb into the product. The founders' previous employers help explain their backgrounds; Firefly's own deployments will determine how those experiences translate into a safety business.

How Ember connects equipment with response workflows

Firefly calls its software platform Ember. The company describes a toolkit spanning 3D site mapping, safety-asset management, team permissions, mass communication, roll call and configurable response workflows. Its product materials also describe emergency-services integration and AI assistance for incident detection, triage and escalation.

The hardware makes that software proposition tangible. Firefly's panic button uses dual-press activation to help reduce accidental alerts and provides haptic confirmation. Its beacons help locate panic-button alerts and offer configurable sound detection. The gateway carries device signals into Ember, with multiple connectivity paths and a specified 12-hour backup battery.

Those are vendor-described capabilities, rather than independent measurements of response quality. They explain what Firefly is selling and the problems its designers are trying to account for. The gateway's backup power, in particular, acknowledges that software used for physical safety inherits conditions at the property where it operates.

Firefly also says its system connects with infrastructure customers already have, including cameras and radios. That matters to the buying conversation because existing equipment is part of the institution's working environment. The scope and behavior of those connections still belong in a site's evaluation and configuration, alongside the people who receive alerts and the actions they are expected to take.

A three-campus deployment gives expansion a setting

Firefly says Front Range Community College uses its system to bring information across 3 campuses into a shared response environment. SiliconANGLE's reporting also identifies that deployment. The announcement provides a named institutional setting, while leaving response-time improvements, detection accuracy and other independently evaluated safety outcomes undisclosed.

DevCuration's coverage of Emergent 3's school-safety platform describes another business connecting alerts, campus information and response workflows. That provides a related software comparison for readers examining how institutions organize safety.

A campus setting makes the coordination proposition specific without supplying those missing measurements. Multiple locations create a reason to connect site information and the people who may need it. Firefly's product offers tools for assigning roles, configuring workflows and communicating across a team, giving the institution decisions to make about how its own response should operate.

The planned expansion across education, healthcare and enterprise will bring that work into different organizations. The financing supports the people and product development needed for the effort, but the company has not published revenue, a complete customer count or a detailed deployment schedule in the reviewed materials. There is no need to invent those figures to understand what the round is funding.

Firefly is offering to become more involved in what happens between an alert and the people acting on it. As the company reaches additional sites, its engineers and customer teams will be working through the local details: which signal matters, who receives it, what information travels with it and how a person knows the request for help has reached somebody who can respond.