How Edge Signal Found Its Edge

February 19, 2025

Edge Signal — Addressing the complexities of edge computing infrastructure
edgesignal.ai

We’ve checked in with Arda Ozgun, CEO at Edge Signal.

Arda, tell us, what’s the story behind Edge Signal?

Edge Signal was founded by Wesley Clover International as a strategic investment to help accelerate edge application development for several portfolio companies. There was a clear need for this as no alternative solutions were available. It has since grown into an AI-powered edge computing platform that helps businesses solve real-world challenges across different industries.

From the start, we focused on creating a low-code/no-code development environment that now connects hundreds of different applications, sensors, microphones, and cameras. This allows businesses to automate operations, gain insights, and make informed decisions using real-time data.
What are some of the real-world applications of your technology?

While we work across many industries, two examples that highlight how our AI creates impact are in retail and hospitality.

In retail, our Always-On Mystery Shopper helps businesses understand customer interactions, ensuring service quality, compliance, and upsell effectiveness—without the need for physical audits. Our AI also enhances security by detecting shoplifting risks, validating alarms, and identifying unusual behavior in real time.

For hospitality, Edge Signal improves both safety and efficiency. Our Safety Audit AI can detect an unattended child in a swimming pool, assigning a safety risk score to trigger immediate action. Similarly, our Tidiness Audit AI checks the real-time condition of a store or hotel against expected standards, ensuring spaces remain welcoming and well-maintained.

These are just two examples of the many ways our AI-driven insights bring value to businesses every day.

What makes your AI different?

Edge Signal isn’t just about collecting data; we focus on turning it into actionable insights. Our AI leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Transfer Learning, allowing it to adapt to different environments, recognize patterns, and adjust based on seasonality and changing business conditions.

For example, our Real-Time AI Alerts use risk scoring to detect unusual activity and automate responses. If a security guard visits a location every night at 1:00 AM, our AI recognizes this as normal and assigns a low-risk score. However, if an unknown person enters at 9:00 PM, the system flags a high-risk score and alerts staff to investigate.

By combining voice, video, and sensor data, our AI creates a complete picture of operations, ensuring that every insight is contextual and useful.

How does Edge Signal help businesses make better decisions?

Our AI helps businesses make smarter decisions by providing real-time insights and actionable recommendations. By continuously analyzing vast amounts of data, detecting patterns, and predicting trends, our AI enables organizations to respond proactively to changing market conditions. Whether it’s optimizing supply chains, improving customer engagement, or mitigating risks, our AI delivers real-time, data-driven guidance that empowers businesses to make informed choices instantly:

  • Business intelligence: Our AI-powered business intelligence delivers real-time insights into traffic patterns, customer engagement, and sales trends. Using advanced machine learning, it identifies key factors shaping customer behavior, helping businesses optimize marketing, personalize experiences, and boost conversions. AI-driven insights refine product offerings, pricing, and promotions, enhancing customer satisfaction and revenue. With predictive analytics and automated recommendations, businesses make data-backed decisions that drive growth and long-term success.
  • Marketing compliance: AI-driven marketing compliance ensures signage, branding, and promotions are correctly implemented across all locations. Using microphones, cameras and smart sensors, businesses can conduct real-time audits, instantly detecting deviations. AI-powered mystery shopper audits further enhance compliance by analyzing in-store visuals, customer interactions, and adherence
    to guidelines. These insights help maintain brand consistency, improve trust, and optimize marketing effectiveness.
  • Store performance audits: AI-powered scorecards rank store performance in real time, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement. By benchmarking top-performing locations, AI identifies best practices in customer engagement, sales, and operational efficiency. For underperforming sites, it provides targeted recommendations on training, inventory, and marketing, helping businesses bridge gaps, maintain consistency, and drive success.

With automated AI-driven audits, real-time alerts, and predictive insights, businesses no longer have to guess—they can act with confidence, backed by data.

How did the innovation come about?

After years of investing in digitizing centralized systems, like ERPs, CRMs, and HR systems, enterprises have shifted their focus towards digitizing remote locations such as warehouses, retail outlets, and manufacturing facilities. However, this transition poses significant challenges due to the high organizational and technical complexities involved in edge computing. To address these challenges, we have introduced a SaaS business model for cloud-edge hybrid solutions, enabling edge applications to run with the same ease and convenience as cloud-based applications. This enables the automation of existing infrastructure, seamlessly integrating sensors, IoT cameras, alarm panels, and other connected devices to enhance real-time monitoring, compliance, and operational efficiency.

A key factor for success is the ability to intelligently process data on-premises, and we have simplified this by offering a low/no-code platform equipped with extensive AI capabilities, including vision and voice AI, as some of the most valuable and available data points on-premises are video and voice data.

Can you tell us more about voice and vision AI?

As cameras are already widely deployed but primarily used in a reactive manner, vision AI plays a crucial role in our Edge Signal platform. By running vision AI on small edge gateways, we create practical solutions that process video data proactively, delivering valuable insights to our customers.

Voice AI, especially when integrated with other systems, is simply transformative to deliver smarter, more efficient, and user-centric solutions. A powerful example is anonymous voice analysis, which can deliver critical information about customer interactions without compromising privacy. Just think of anonymous voice AI analyzing conversations in real time to determine if upsell opportunities are being offered effectively during customer interactions or real-time sentiment monitoring. This creates a win-win scenario for businesses and their customers, transforming every interaction into an opportunity to deliver more value. Voice AI is revolutionizing interactions much like the transition from silent films to next-generation movies—an innovation that unlocked entirely new possibilities and redefined the way we engage with technology.

What makes Edge Signal so unique?

Let’s start with how we deliver our service. We make it very easy—and very secure—to onboard new customers and additional sites, with a very small and cost-effective gateway. This requires zero maintenance, and if needed, can simply be replaced with a new one as our gateway is capable of discovering existing infrastructure, such as CCTV cameras.

To give you an example, we onboarded a large customer in Ukraine during the war. All onboarding was done remotely and was completed quickly and seamlessly—thanks to our comprehensive edge computing platform. This is an achievement I’m particularly proud of.

We provide a robust, enterprise-ready edge solution that simplifies prototyping, developing, and managing high-quality edge applications. With a unified dashboard, organizations can seamlessly onboard and manage edge infrastructure and applications, enhancing resource efficiency, reducing environmental impact, and supporting ESG goals.

To give you more details, our platform leverages a wide array of connectors to integrate existing systems—such as alarm systems, microphones, cameras, and sensors—making them smarter through advanced AI. As a software-first company, we transform hardware into intelligent systems, demonstrating that software outpaces hardware in functionality, features, and innovation. Leveraging our deep AI expertise, we utilize multi-modal AI—integrating data from multiple sources such as sensors, IoT cameras, transaction logs, and customer interactions—to generate comprehensive insights and drive data-backed conclusions.

What are some of the benefits?

Edge Signal ensures privacy with anonymous access, keeping videos, voice and data on-premises for secure real-time processing without storage or off-site transfers. Another benefit is real-time actionability: Data is processed in real time, enabling immediate actions without delays. Other benefits include:

  • Hybrid cloud advantage: Our hybrid cloud approach combines the strengths of edge and cloud computing, ensuring data stays on-premises while leveraging the cloud’s scalability.
  • Easy onboarding: As mentioned earlier, low-cost devices, remote onboarding, and no need for on-site personnel make deployment effortless.
  • Intelligent insights: Our platform delivers actionable insights rather than raw data, enabling users to make informed decisions effortlessly This includes site specific insights such as trends, rankings, and real-time statistics for single locations, including correlations and patterns. It also includes account-level insights: Benchmarks, score tables, and historical trends across multiple locations to simplify remote management and improve decision-making.
  • Seamless integration with existing sensors, cameras, and equipment—no NVR or DVR reconfiguration needed, ensuring a quick and hassle-free setup.
    Another important thing to mention is that we go beyond traditional AI by implementing AI fusion—a blend of multiple AI systems—to deliver smarter, more effective solutions tailored to our customers’ needs.

You mentioned AI Fusion. Could you please elaborate further?

Of course! AI Fusion is about blending multiple AI technologies to create innovative and comprehensive solutions. We’re doing this to enhance functionality and address complex challenges effectively. Examples include:

  • Transfer learning in real-time: This technique leverages pre-trained models to adapt and perform tasks in real-time scenarios, enabling quicker deployment and responsiveness to new data or situations. While it delivers strong performance and intelligence in the traditional sense, it can be challenging to incorporate contextual understanding.
  • Video AI based on generative AI: This involves using advanced AI models to deeply understand scenes or video clips. By analyzing patterns, objects, and actions within the content, it provides richer insights and contextual understanding. While it is not ideal for real-time processing, it can complement real-time models. To achieve meaningful results, the context must be enhanced with data from the surrounding environment, as the technology is not yet mature enough to deliver standalone outcomes.
  • Voice AI: Adding voice recognition and processing capabilities introduces a contextual layer, much like sound in movies compared to silent films, providing richer data interpretation and enhancing user interaction.
  • Integration with IoT and other data sources: By combining AI with IoT devices and additional data streams, it triggers dynamic, data-driven actions, creating a truly interconnected and responsive system.

Through AI Fusion, these components work together to deliver a seamless, holistic solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s impressive! You must have a great team behind you, Arda!

I have so much respect for our team! Everyone works really hard, but we have a lot of fun too—getting together for dinners out or weekend getaways. Our Edge Signal team is composed of highly skilled full stack developers, senior AI PhD-level engineers.

Collaboration is essential for pushing the limits of what’s possible and driving innovation within our advanced development environment. Edge Signal is an API-first product, tested with full automation regularly, DevOps and CI/CD encompass all AI capabilities and feedback mechanisms. The system operates with AI Ops at its core.

Given the cutting-edge nature of the technology, we work closely with universities. In addition to defense and LLM projects we are currently undertaking with academic partners, myself and our CTO, Burak Cakmak, co-authored a recently published IEEE Paper in collaboration with the University of Ottawa, “LLM-Based Edge Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey on Architectures, Applications, Security and Trustworthiness”.

I’m also proud to say that we’ve been named a recipient of the 2023 IEEE Ottawa Section High Technology Company Award in recognition of “providing a SaaS platform that simplifies edge computing to enable enterprises and application developers to accelerate edge application development while reducing infrastructure management costs and increasing quality and security.”

How much growth have you seen this past year?

Edge Signal has seen substantial growth—both in terms of monthly revenues and head count, fueled by its innovative AI-powered edge computing platform, which has gained traction across multiple industries including retail, hospitality, and logistics. Our headcount doubled in 2024, and we’ve acquired several enterprise clients. For this year we’re expecting to see a substantial revenue increase. Growth through our channel network is crucial. We have made significant progress by building a robust channel network comprising thousands of resellers, as well as partnering with global telecom providers to strategically position our product.

What’s next for Edge Signal?

We’re always evolving! As edge computing, vision AI, and generative AI advance, we’re expanding our platform to make it even more scalable, responsive, and insightful. Our goal is to ensure businesses have the tools they need to make fast, informed decisions—no matter the industry.

To learn more, visit EdgeSignal.ai.