India’s first DPDP-compliant vendor-neutral AI video intelligence
32 cameras. One supervisor. Zero hand-holding after sundown. Aarav fuses the venue’s existing ONVIF cameras with an always-on AI operator — running locally on a Raspberry Pi 5 plus a Kerala-hosted reasoner — to triage intrusion and tamper events in milliseconds, escalate only what crosses policy, and keep a BSA §63-grade audit trail of every decision.
Illustrative — drawn from a real shift, names redacted.
Why Aarav
Each claim below is anchored to a primary source — a competitor’s own published page, a statute, or a peer-reviewed study — and survives 3-vote adversarial verification. No vendor accuracy numbers, no “AI replaces guards”, no premium-discount promises.
Keep your cameras. Get full AI.
Verkada's own Command Connector page documents that AI-powered search has "limited support" + "higher latency" on third-party ONVIF cameras, and License Plate Recognition is completely excluded on non-Verkada feeds. Aarav treats every ONVIF camera as a first-class citizen — CP Plus, Hikvision, TP-Link, Dahua, InSight, mixed-vendor sites — all share the same AI surface.
Verkada Command Connector spec page (3-0 verified, 2026-06-08).
Built for the affidavit. Built for the DPB.
Neither Verkada nor Lumana publishes any India-specific regulatory posture — their certifications are SOC 2 / NDAA / HIPAA / GDPR. Aarav ships DPDP Act 2023 Rule 7 (visitor notice + 72h DPB breach process), BSA §63 Part A+B per-instance certificate generation, and NDMA §6.3.6.1 quantitative trigger/action playbooks today. A 12-18 month India-specific build moat.
Lumana Trust Center + Verkada compliance pages, DPDP Rules 2025 Rule 7 (3-0 verified).
~10× cheaper at the camera tier. ~3-5× cheaper at the bridge.
Verkada hardware MSRPs run $799 (indoor dome) to $5,299 (PTZ) plus a mandatory per-camera annual license. Commodity Indian ONVIF cameras retail at ₹3,500-15,000 (~$42-180) — an order of magnitude lower. Verkada's own May 2026 announcement attributes their price hike to "tariffs in the US" — a structural cost disadvantage their public messaging now admits.
Verkada product portfolio + Verkada May 5 2026 blog post (3-0 verified).
How it works
A Raspberry Pi at the venue speaks ONVIF directly to every camera and runs a local YOLO presence filter to discard empty-frame events before they ever leave the building.
A hybrid supervisor — qwen2.5:14b running on an on-venue Mac mini for sub-second LAN inference, with Anthropic Claude Haiku as failover when the Mac is offline — correlates events across cameras and opens incidents only when behaviour crosses written policy. Every call carries its reasoning trace.
Confirmed threats reach the on-call operator on WhatsApp with a snapshot and a one-tap acknowledge. Footage is mirrored off-site to vendor-agnostic S3 within seconds.
Hardware ladder
Aarav’s edge tier scales with camera count, not vendor lock-in. Verified against Frigate published benchmarks and NVIDIA official specs (3-0).
| Tier | Hardware | Capacity | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SMB | Pi 5 8GB + Hailo-8L AI HAT+ | 8–12 cameras | 13 TOPS, Indian-channel-easy, cheapest viable tier. |
| Commodity | Intel N100 mini-PC + OpenVINO | 16–24 cameras | No NVIDIA dependency. ~15ms MobileNetV2 inference on iGPU. |
| Standard | Jetson Orin Nano Super | 32–48 cameras | 67 sparse INT8 TOPS (free JetPack update from 40). LA Mirage class. |
| Heavy | Jetson Orin NX 16GB / Mac mini M4 | 64+ cameras | Local qwen2.5vl-7B feasibility. La Mirage prod runs Mac mini M4. |
Talk to us
Three details qualify us fast: sector, camera count, and whether you already have an NVR / VMS in place. We’ll come back with a hardware ladder recommendation, an estimate, and a slot for a 30-minute walkthrough.
We do not share your details with third parties. Your data is processed under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023; you can request access, correction, or erasure at any time via /dpdp-dsar.
Compliance & evidentiary value
Visitor notice template, Rule 7 breach runbook, Rule 8 public DSAR endpoint. Per-camera retention windows + Data Principal lookup live today.
DPDP Rule 7 — without-delay notification + two-stage DPB.
Every footage retrieval ships with the BSA 2023 §63 Part A (party) + Part B (expert) certificate as a one-click signed PDF, SHA-256 hashed, with device-uptime telemetry attached. The append-only audit log is the source of evidentiary truth.
BSA 2023 §63 supersedes IEA §65B; Arjun Panditrao Khotkar SC 2020; Umer Ali (Ker HC 2025).
NDMA §6.3.6.1 quantitative trigger/action playbooks. IS 2189 fire-detection alignment. Declared-CCTV warranty under IRDAI GEN2323 Clause 14 is auditable from the dashboard — offline-at-loss is never silent.
NDMA §6.3.6.1 (3-0); GEN2323 Clause 14 — Damage Entry Warranty.
Live deployment — LA Mirage Convention Center · Thrissur
5 InSight S485 AI cameras handle the entrance and side approaches with on-board intrusion and line-crossing detectors. 8 TP-Link VIGI cameras add interior coverage, and 19 CP Plus (Dahua OEM) units form the outer rail-facing perimeter. A single Raspberry Pi 5 pulls every detector event over ONVIF and ships triaged incidents to a Kerala-hosted supervisor in under 200 milliseconds end-to-end.
Read the full thesis: Pitch deck v3 (2026-06-09).
Thirty minutes. Operator dashboard, escalation chain, and the decision audit on a real incident from last week. Or run your existing camera estate through the compatibility checker first.