 And welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios. We're excited to have our next guest who is an Abbey Award winner from the Grace Hopper. A celebration we've been computing early in October. We tried to get her on then. Schedules didn't match, so it took us a few months but we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Mercedes Soria. She's a VP of Software Engineering for NISCO. Mercedes, welcome. Thank you, thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Absolutely, so congratulations again on your award for leadership and part of the winnings of that is you got to keynote in front of 18,000 people. So what was your impression of Grace Hopper and B, how did you like keynoteing in front of 18,000 folks? Yes, I was, what was Grace Hopper? It was a huge community of women in technology. I was so excited to be there. Everybody was just looking up to women. Everybody was trying to help each other. How do you go forward in your career? And obviously it's focused on STEM careers which is one of my passions. So I was so glad to be there. And how was to keynote in front of 18,000 people? So I hadn't done that before, so I can check it off. My bucket list, that was one thing. And it was so amazing. There were so many women who just clapped and they just kept supporting it and I had to stop several times while I was giving the speech. So it was once in a lifetime opportunity that I'm very grateful for. It's an amazing accomplishment. Again, congratulations. And it's an amazing show. If you haven't been to Grace Hopper, you have to sign up, how fast you say it, Zelda? 25 minutes. 25 minutes, so. Go to AnitaBee.org now, that's right, they changed URL to check it out. So let's jump in about night scope. So for the people who aren't familiar, go to the website nightscope.com, a bunch of really cool, fun stuff. Tell us about what night scope's all about. So night scope is a company that is trying to cut it, to cut the crime cost to the U.S. in half. So most people don't know that the U.S. spends about $1 trillion a year just to deal with crime in the U.S. So our goal at night scope is to cut that in half. With the use of new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, we have a group is software plus hardware plus humans. So we take the good things that humans do, which is make strategic decisions. The good things the machines do, which is do the monotonous work and store data for a very long time. And we combine those to try to help with crime. Right, so that's a nice explanation. The short answer is if you go to the website, it's all rolled up into these cool robots that look like C-3PO. And I'm wondering if there's a little man inside there, but we'll get into that later. But I think it's a really interesting concept because you are bringing together many of the hot topics in technology right now. So one of them just with robotics. I mean, you've got these robots of various shapes and sizes. But as you said, really it's the synergy of the robots with the people that give kind of a one plus one makes three effect. How is it, you know, where are those kind of points of intersection and how does the robot help the human do a better job and how does the human help the robot do a better job? Yeah, so the robot helps the human because in this case security guards have to walk around the same places all day long, right? They have their roots, they do that all day long and they get very, very bored. And they get to the point where they don't care anymore and they just scan a badge and then that is the job, right? So that's what the robots do, which is they don't mind going around the same area all day long recording data, recording video. That's what the synergy is. Now, what the robots at this point can do is make a decision in terms of, okay, I have these five things, should I make an alarm to my supervisor and set a garnish to come, right? The robot only provides information. So all of that information that we provide is so the human can make a decision on what to do next. And does it feed into, I mean, obviously, these are big security systems that already exist inside these big buildings and these big facilities. Does your robot tie back into those facilities? Is it a different layer on top of it? How does it work with the existing security infrastructure that's already in place? Yeah, so the existing security infrastructure is a bit separate at this time. There is a project that we're working on in terms to integrate because there's so many security systems out there. For a startup like us, we need to be very smart in terms of where we spend our resources. So we gotta do a study and figure out which would the better sender send, the better companies that we need to partner with to do that. So by this point, it's a separate tool. So you open it, all you need is a Chrome browser. You can open it from anywhere in the world. And your security people can look at all the data the machine has collected. Right, so the other interesting piece that you're tying together via these machines is really this combination of AI and ML, artificial intelligence machine learning. But also, your background is in user interface. So it can't just be happening in the background because these machines need to do their job executing through and with people on the UI side and the security guards and the security infrastructure behind them. So as you've kind of introduced more AI and machine learning into the software components that you can drive the UI, how is that changing the world? How's the UI world changing because now you've got so much more data and so much more kind of compute behind that before it even gets to the actual user that's interfacing with it? Yes, so the UI is a lot more rich these days. It used to be a web page and HTML and JavaScript page and that's all it did, right? But now we have a lot more information that we can provide. For example, we have machine learning algorithms that detect if there's people in an image. So I don't only tell you this is my video but I also give you a picture of the person that I just saw and then I tell you, hey, this is what I saw. It makes your experience a lot more inclusive. In another potential integration point, right? Obviously with photos in the security system for IDs and passes and all those things. Yeah, even face detection at some point as well is very important for us. Now you have four different models. What are, why do you have so many models? What's kind of the use cases that would drive you to have four different models? Hard to support four models instead of one as a startup? Yes, so customers have very different needs. So crime doesn't happen just in a shopping mall. Crime happens at PG&E offices. It happens at the mall. It happens at different locations. It could be outside, it could be inside, it could be in a hospital, it could be in a parking lot. So what we tried to do was to cover all of those potential places where crime would be. So with that, we have four products. We have the K5, which is our first product. It goes into ADA compliant environments like hospitals and data centers. It's a big robot and mainly used for things like a parking lot to detect license plates, to make sure that it's monitoring all the outside. Our second product is the K3, which is a smaller machine and what it does is mainly goes inside. It can go through a door and it can do things like monitoring who's at the office at night, racing on alert if there was a fire, stuff that happens inside. We have the K7, which goes to outside places where you have things like speed bumps. You have different kind of terrain, gravel, or other type. And then the K1, which is our static model that what we're working on that for the future is to have concealed weapon detection at that point, which is something that is very useful for places that have like for hospitals when somebody comes in they wanna be able to know if these people are armed. All right. I'm just curious if you can share where customers have seen the most impact, the most benefit by using one of your robots. What specific kind of behaviors has just been a game changer when they've put in a night scope robot? Yeah, so I can't tell you the actual customer that is something outside. No, no, that's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would tell you one example. We have, for example, a hospital. This place is open 24-7, obviously the emergency room. And when they will have, it's down in LA. So they will have at least one break-in every week at the parking lot. So we put our machines there and the past seven months that they have been there, they get zero, they get no break-ins. And then nurses now feel safe for going to their cars. People feel safe for going there at night. So that is one example. We also had an example of a shopping mall where there was a guy who was basically exposing himself and nobody could catch him because he would drive. As soon as he saw a security guard, he would drive out. So we were able to catch that person as well. There are some people who came to steal merchandise. So they came, they stole something they left and the very next day they come back and they try to sell these back to the mall people. So by seeing who these people are and then determining that they came back to the mall, we were able to apprehend them as criminals. Right. On the first example, on the parking lot example, does the robot have kind of active deterrents that it can do? Can it sound alarms? Like lights, I mean, to make people feel safer in a parking lot, that's very different than just kind of monitoring things. Yeah, so what the robot does is it has a sound that it's all day, it's playing that sound. There's a lot of lights, the lights change color, the term based on what's happening around the robot. Another thing that we have that helps a lot of people feel safe, we have a push to talk functionality. So if you were feeling something was wrong and you can push that button and you can directly talk to the people at the security operation center. Right, right. They can walk you through what to do, they can follow you while you go through your car. There's different functionality that we have that helps people feel that they're safe outside. Right. And on the shoplifting one, it's interesting, right? Because lots of stores have cameras, right? That's not a new thing. So what did your system do differently that the regular kind of camera that they had in there before probably would have filmed the person but didn't necessarily, was it firing off the alert, recognizing they were back again? Did somebody go in and manually type in this particular person in the shoplifting? How did you guys take it to a much different level than just kind of a static security cam? So the main thing that you should keep in mind for static cameras is there's always black spots, blind spots, there's no way that they can see everything. And mainly you have cameras inside of the shops. You don't have them outside. So what we did is we not only got the video of the person inside of the shop, but we saw them when they came outside. We saw them when they were moving. All of this is recorded in video. And we can then match them and see the people who were. Another thing that we do that cameras don't do is we can detect your mobile devices. Anything that has, that is looking for a network, we can identify that device. So, and that is always for you and that's always for that device. So we can match those devices when they come in. Right. And like, we shouldn't have waited this long, but that one of the most interesting things about the company and what you guys do, and it's highlighted by what you just said is a way you go to market. People are not buying these robots, right? You offer the robots as a service. So, really interesting model and really brings up interesting things. Like you just said, where you can do all kinds of software upgrades. You can do hardware upgrades. You can do all types of changes to the actual unit that the customer just benefits as a classic SaaS model. So how did you get to that stage and how do people like having now kind of a simple monthly payment with all the upgrades and constant, I would imagine a lot of upgrades coming pretty consistently. Pretty interesting way to go to market. How is that received in the market? It's very well. People really accept it, especially when it's a new technology. We decided from the beginning that we wanted to be to own the whole technology stack and even the robot itself. Because we knew there would be a lot of upgrades. We knew there would be changes and we wanted to serve our customers in the best way that was possible. So to help people adopt new technology, we help them with how do they perceive it on a daily basis. If you come to somebody and says I want you to buy a $100,000 robot and you don't know what that's going to be. Or if you said I charge you $10 an hour and give you a robot that not only changes software every other week, it changes hardware every six months and you have whatever robot will fit your needs the best. People are really accepting of that model to the point that all the companies are jumping into the same thing. It's really interesting because then it begs kind of where you guys will develop as a company. Are you a robotics company? Are you a software company? Are you a software monitoring company? Do you become really a security AI company that pulls from lots of different data and lots of different sources? It really opens up a broad range of opportunities for you guys in which you want to go or where you find your most expertise or kind of where the market takes you. Pretty exciting way to go to market. Yeah, so what we decided to do was we wanted to be the apple of security guards. So what Apple does is they have their software, the hardware, they own all of it and therefore they have a very loyal following. We want to beat that for security guards. So we own the whole environment, we make changes when we need to and then we go to market that way. Okay, that's, it's a great story. And again, it's nightscope.com. They're fun pictures for one, but it's a great story. But before I let you go, Telly would not be happy if I didn't take a few minutes to talk about your journey. How did you get here? VP of software engineering, you know, software's eating the world. It's a great place to be. You've got a solutions-based system, really it's a bunch of metal wrapped up with software inside. So how did you get here? And I wonder if you can share a little bit of your journey to become VP of software engineering. Yeah, so I am an immigrant. I'm not from the U.S. I was born in South America. And when you're in South America and somebody tells you, hey, there's an opportunity for you to go study in the U.S., you take that opportunity. So I came to the U.S. to study for college. I had a matchellers in computer science and then a masters in computer science. Where did you go to school? I went to Middle Tennessee State University. And like I said, when somebody tells you you're going to the U.S., you don't ask questions, you just go. So who made you that offer? How did that come about? My university in Ecuador, where I was from, they had an agreement with the university in Tennessee. So they will send students back and forth on an exchange program. Okay, so you're a good student. They identified you as having great potential and you got picked for that program. So 5,000 people apply for 20 spots when I applied. Wow. So 20 of us came and out of the 20, the only two people who are staying in the U.S., my sister and I were twins. I have a twin sister. Because you had your sister for support, maybe? Probably. I've probably had a lot to do with it. That's an interesting case. With technology, I found my way into Nightscope. And Nightscope is a really good company for women in technology specifically. And that is some of the work that I pushed myself to do. Our women in technology numbers are about 25 to 28% of the company, which is a huge number for Silicon Valley. Right. And then we hire women, we try to mentor them. I myself take time to spend time with them and then help them get a career that they're excited about. And when did you discover your affinity for computer science? See, it's always a great debate, right? As to when is the best time or when is the optimal time or the most popular time for young girls and then eventually young women to get involved in STEM. What was your experience? So I lived with my uncle and Ecuador and my mother. So I always knew I wanted to do something structured. And at the beginning he was an architect so I thought I would be an architect. But then I started reading some science fiction books. And the closest thing for me to science fiction making that reality was career in computer science and technology. So that's how I started. And that has led me to now night's scope. So and we're doing the most advanced technology that is out there. We're out there with artificial intelligence. We have machine learning. All of the technologies that are out there, robotics, we are using them to put them to use for the greater good. Our job is to keep America safe and we all are working towards that goal. But I think you just wanna make something fun that looked like C3BO. It's more like actually to actually, and if you wanna see more go to nightscope.com. Okay, and final question. So your advice, more general advice to older girls or young women in terms of what they should do if they want to get into this or why they should consider a career in STEM if they haven't already. A career in STEM is very, very rewarding. You're going to be doing sometimes things that nobody else has done ever before. You're out there in front of everything that is happening with technology. And it's actually exciting. When you find other women that do what you want to do, look at people's backgrounds, look at what they've done, look what they're trying to accomplish and then make sure that you get into their lives and they help you through it. There's a lot of women who will be happy to help out and one of those is me. I'd be glad to help people out. Mercedes, thank you so much again for spending some time. Congratulations on the award and coming in and telling us your story and educating us more on nightscope. Thank you. And if everybody wants to know, nightscope.com, they can find all about our technology. All right. She's Mercedes. I'm Jeff Frick. We've been having a cute conversation in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.