By: MeaCulpa (Empowered by AI)
In today’s justice system and child advocacy world, digital evidence has become one of the most powerful levers for truth—but only when it’s handled with integrity, speed, and clarity. Guardify is a secure, end-to-end digital evidence management platform that helps justice and child advocacy teams capture, organize, and share critical digital evidence with speed, trust, and transparency.
What Problem Guardify Is Trying to Solve
Justice and advocacy organizations deal with enormous volumes of digital evidence—video and audio recordings, interviews, photos, reports—and often it’s stored across outdated, siloed, or costly systems. The result: inefficiencies, risks to the chain of custody, delays in cases, and elevated costs.
Guardify addresses these problems by offering a centralized, secure cloud platform with workflow automation, secure sharing, evidence archiving, compliance (HIPAA, CJIS, etc.), and integrations with existing case management systems and forensic tools. Essentially, Guardify replaces messy physical transfers (DVDs, USBs) and disjointed storage solutions with a system built for speed, transparency, and justice.
The Team Behind Guardify
Guardify is led by Ben Jackson (CEO & Co-founder), a serial founder, investor, and child maltreatment expert who shapes the company’s vision, fundraising, and strategic partnerships. The rest of the team combines technologists, engineers, product experts, sales, support, and compliance specialists—many with backgrounds in justice technology, SaaS, and public safety. Their values: mission-first, responsiveness, and protecting both evidence and people.
Integrating Engage Vision: The Luis Merino Acquisition
A major strategic move in Guardify’s evolution has been its acquisition of Engage Vision, founded by Luis Merino, a company noted for its AI-driven video intelligence tools. This acquisition isn’t just about adding features; it’s about substantially upgrading how data is analyzed, not just stored.
Image of Panel: Luis Merino of Engage Vision — founder of Engage Vision, whose video intelligence capabilities are now part of Guardify with John Grange.
Luis Merino’s work at Engage Vision focused on advanced video analytics—object detection, real-time behavior insights, analytics over large video datasets. When Guardify acquired Engage Vision, they brought in that expertise, meaning that Guardify is not only a place to securely store and share digital evidence, but soon will be a platform that helps extract actionable intelligence out of the evidence automatically.
For example, instead of a forensic interviewer or prosecutor having to scrub through hours of recordings to find critical moments, the integrated system can flag anomalies, suspicious movement, or other relevant frames; it can also assist with redaction or with generating summaries. Luis himself commented on the acquisition: “(Engage Vision) helps scale capabilities to law enforcement and justice-focused organizations,” enabling “faster, higher-insight video workflows” now embedded in Guardify’s core suite. (from Silicon Prairie News Article)
What Makes Guardify Different
Guardify sets itself apart in several ways:
- Transparent pricing, with no hidden device or per-user fees.
- Faster implementation, aiming for reduced lag from purchase to being live in court or in the field.
- An open partner ecosystem, integrating with recording tools, case management, analytics, and forensic systems.
- A customer support model built around justice-impacting prioritization—technical issues that threaten evidence handling or delay cases are elevated.
The Engage Vision acquisition adds a dimension of video analytics and AI, augmenting Guardify’s value to customers who need more than basic evidence storage—they need intelligent tools that reduce the burden of review, speed discovery, and help maintain high integrity in the evidence pipeline.
A Real-World Customer Insight
Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) and similar organizations often operate under tight deadlines, limited budgets, and heavy emotional weight. One CAC in Nebraska used Guardify to replace physical media transfers of recorded forensic interviews. Previously, interviews were burned to DVDs, transported or mailed, stored physically, tracked manually across multiple stakeholders, and sometimes copied insecurely.
After adopting Guardify, the center reported significant time savings: faster sharing with prosecution and law enforcement partners, reduced costs associated with physical media and shipping, and improved security. Staff could spend less time managing logistics and more time supporting children and families. More importantly, case preparation improved, because participants had earlier and more reliable access to supporting evidence, transcripts, and relevant video segments.
With the Engage Vision tools now part of guardify, that same center expects to benefit from automated video analytics: identifying key interview segments, redacting faces or voices more rapidly, detecting environmental cues (sound or motion) that might help in investigations. These efficiencies translate into faster justice, less trauma for victims, and better preservation of evidence.
Vision for the Future
Guardify’s long-term aim over the next 5-10 years is bold:
- Become the trusted standard for digital evidence platforms across courts, law enforcement, CACs, and legal institutions.
- Ensure equitable access: that communities, regardless of size or resources, can securely manage and share evidence.
- Expand the intelligence tools (thanks to Engage Vision) for things like AI-assisted summarization, video object detection, behavior alerts, redaction, etc.
- Grow integration with partner ecosystems so Guardify data can feed into larger systems like court management, forensic systems, defense systems, compliance tools.
- Maintain the most rigorous compliance and security: HIPAA, CJIS, chain-of-custody, encryption, audit logs.
Challenges Guardify Needs to Overcome
Even with strong positioning, there are headwinds:
- Shifting expectations: Many agencies already invested in hardware or existing systems are skeptical of cloud-based or AI-augmented workflows. Guardify will need strong pilot case studies, trust-building, and proof of performance.
- Procurement & Regulation: Government contracts, law enforcement agencies, CACs all have strict procurement processes, compliance requirements, budgets, and sometimes very slow decision cycles.
- Scaling infrastructure & talent: Handling video at scale, ensuring uptime, data security, and responsiveness as usage increases is nontrivial. Also, AI models for video must be accurate, fair, and ethically sound.
- Privacy & liability: Managing sensitive content, ensuring privacy, handling redaction correctly, maintaining chain of custody, auditing access. Laws around video and evidence sharing can differ across jurisdictions.
Why Guardify Matters
Guardify is more than a tech startup; it addresses a core need in the system of justice and care. When evidence is delayed, mishandled, or inaccessible:
- prosecutions drag on,
- victims wait longer,
- risk of lost or corrupted evidence increases,
- trust in the justice system erodes.
Guardify, especially with the Engage Vision capabilities, helps drive justice forward by making evidence: secure, accessible, intelligible, high-integrity, and efficient.
