Safeza AVA-X, a Cape Town-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, has been selected as one of eight companies globally to pitch at SelectUSA in Washington DC in the defence category.
The event, taking place in May, is a programme run by the US Department of Commerce that connects international companies with US investment opportunities, strategic partners and policy stakeholders.
The flagship event is the annual SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington, DC, which includes dedicated sector tracks, among them defence.
The local technology company was founded in 2026 by Armand de Beer, CEO. It was established to commercialise AVA-X's AI video analytics in South Africa and, ultimately, across allied markets.
The core technology, the AI models behind facial recognition and object detection, was developed in Switzerland by AVA-X, the technology partner, and has already been deployed in European law enforcement and critical infrastructure environments.
“What Safeza AVA-X brings is the South African commercialisation vehicle, the local market knowledge and a clear strategic plan – to take that Swiss-engineered foundation and train it specifically on South African conditions, our demographics, our environments, our high-crime realities with the goal of building the world's most stress-tested AI video intelligence system,” says De Beer.
“The models are entirely our own, developed in Switzerland and not reliant on OpenAI, Google, or any big-tech platform. And the entire stack runs on-premises. Data never leaves the customer's infrastructure.”
Public safety support
Safeza AVA-X has been selected as part of the official South African delegation to participate in the defence track at this year's summit.
The company will be presenting how sovereign-aligned, auditable, on-premises AI video analytics can support public safety, border security and critical infrastructure priorities in the US and partner markets.
“The defence track is specifically relevant to us because US government and allied defence procurement increasingly requires AI systems that are on-premises, auditable and free of foreign cloud dependencies, which is precisely what our platform delivers. Being part of the South African delegation in that context is both a meaningful commercial opportunity and a point of national pride,” De Beer says.
He notes the company is a technology and solutions provider focused on on-premises AI video analytics for security and critical infrastructure. He explains that its core offerings include Sentinel Investigation, an intelligence and case analysis platform that allows investigators to search archived footage and documents by face, object, or appearance within milliseconds, rather than manually reviewing hours of material.
De Beer points out that Sentinel Live provides real-time monitoring with AI-assisted detection, alerts, and anomaly flagging across live video feeds, while Sentinel Access enables biometric access control using facial recognition for secure environments.
According to De Beer, all three solutions run entirely on customer-owned, on-premises infrastructure with no cloud dependency, ensuring data residency remains with the client at all times – a requirement he notes is critical for law enforcement, border security and enterprise use cases.
McCann probe
He reveals that the technology was used in the Madeleine McCann investigation. “In 2023, our Swiss technology partner AVA-X was approached to assess one of the most high-profile missing persons claims in recent memory. A young Polish woman, Julia Faustyna, also known as Julia Wendell, had gone viral on social media claiming to be Madeleine McCann, the British child who disappeared from a Portuguese holiday apartment in 2007.
“We applied our face-matching technology, the same technology at the core of our Sentinel Investigation platform, to run a facial recognition analysis comparing Julia Faustyna's images with photographs of Madeleine McCann. The results were unambiguous. The distance between the faces was so significant that AVA-X stated publicly: it is practically impossible for Julia to be Madeleine,” De Beer notes.
Importantly, he adds, the technology also correctly confirmed that Julia Faustyna is who she says she is, her childhood photos matched her adult face accurately.
“The system distinguished cleanly between two separate questions, which is exactly what you need from a forensic-grade tool. That result was covered internationally and remains one of the clearest public demonstrations of what our technology can do in a real-world, high-stakes missing persons context: deliver a rapid, evidence-based finding when human review alone is insufficient. The conclusion was consistent with subsequent DNA testing.”
According to De Beer, the underlying AVA-X technology has been deployed in European law enforcement, border security and critical infrastructure contexts, with the Swiss Confederation being the most prominent confirmed public deployment.
“It has been validated in operational settings, not just in controlled environments, which is a meaningful distinction in this industry.
“In South Africa, we are currently in active engagement across government, road safety, retail, hospitality and private security sectors. Our focus at this stage is building the right deployments that will allow us to train the models on South African-specific data, diverse skin tones, challenging environmental conditions, and the crime typologies specific to South Africa. That training process is central to our ambition of developing the world's most stress-tested AI video surveillance system.”
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