A Brazilian Startup Is Betting on AI to Fight Crime. Critics See a Surveillance State
· Time
Erick Coser found himself at gunpoint. It was March 2024, and he was standing at the door of his girlfriend’s São Paulo apartment building when an unmasked man arrived by food delivery bike. He pulled out a pistol and demanded Coser’s phone and the six-digit code protecting it. Share the wrong combination, the attacker warned, and he’d pull the trigger.
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Using Find My iPhone, Coser watched the device weave through the suburbs and into a drug cartel-controlled favela on the city's outskirts. Thousands of Brazilian reals, the national currency, were soon siphoned from his bank account.
Unbeknownst to the gunman, his getaway was also captured by a street-facing camera fixed to the apartment building. It was one of 20,000 deployed by a start-up Coser co-founded in 2020, called Gabriel. Each has a green LED ring; their distinct glow can be seen across much of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte. Gabriel uses artificial intelligence to scan license plates—not faces— and shares the information with police to help piece together crime scenes across multiple angles. The system processes about four million license plates a day.
That night, Gabriel’s AI failed to identify the motorbike’s license plate. But by Coser’s account, the man went on to rob several more people in the same camera-dense area, and one of those crimes gave Gabriel the plate that led to his arrest.
Even in the wider state of São Paulo, Brazil's richest, only about 2% of theft cases are ever solved, meaning muggers operate with near impunity. Coser is betting he can turn that around. “Gabriel exists to enable the state—the Military Police and Civil Police in your region and neighborhood—to operate with the best possible intelligence,” he said at Web Summit Rio in June to an audience of technologists and business executives. The start-up has raised about $27 million from investors including Qualcomm Ventures and SoftBank.
The police don’t pay a penny for Gabriel. Residents do. Apartment buildings and businesses subscribe like they would for internet service—roughly $5 per household a month, according to Coser. The balance of privacy with security exists on a spectrum, he says. He firmly believes most Brazilians are “willing to trade privacy for security.”
Coser's pitch is that transparency keeps Gabriel accountable. Subscribers receive updates via WhatsApp when police make a nearby arrest aided by Gabriel, which doubles as “PR for the police,” Coser says. In June, it launched Gabriel365, a free AI platform that answers questions about crime, featuring an interactive map and neighborhood bulletins, leveraging Gabriel's own data. Coser’s betting that transparency can restore some of the faith in institutions and maintain trust in the company. “Why do we think Palantir has a bad reputation in the U.S.? Because nobody knows what Palantir does,” Coser says.
Gabriel’s relationship with the state has nevertheless been subject to scrutiny. In 2023, an investigation by the Intercept Brasil revealed that Gabriel shared real-time information with police via clandestine WhatsApp and Slack channels. The company said these channels were created to deal with high volumes of formal requests and it has since formalized communications with authorities. All requests now are routed through “Gabriel for Authorities,” the company says—an auditable platform that police access via an individual login, so their actions are tied to them personally.
More recently, the company caught the attention of Rio’s state legislature, which in November ordered the removal of 400 Gabriel cameras from public roads. “The company has a worrying relationship with public authorities accessing confidential data … We are living in a 'Big Brother' scenario without consent or guarantees of privacy,” said Alexandre Knoploch, legislative assembly deputy, in a statement at the time.
Similar debates are unfolding in the United States with Atlanta-based Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that got its start selling connected license plate readers to homeowners associations. Flock expanded to sell to law enforcement agencies, which now represent the majority of its business. It has faced backlash in recent months after its network was used for immigration-related searches. Since the start of 2026, over 20 American towns and cities have deactivated their Flock cameras or cancelled their contracts. In February, Amazon's Ring canceled its partnership Flock Safety following backlash to a Superbowl commercial touting the integration.
“I'll never say never, but for the foreseeable future, I don't see myself selling to governments,” Coser says. “I don’t want to play that game.”
The company says it will never deploy facial recognition or other biometric analysis, either. When a citizen files a police report and shares it with Gabriel, the company hands the victim relevant footage with faces blurred. Officers receive it unblurred. Gabriel doesn't decide who is guilty, Coser says. It leaves that call to authorities.
But critics argue that while Gabriel doesn’t run facial recognition itself, it plays a role in enabling those systems. In August, Gabriel announced full integration with Smart Sampa, a São Paulo municipal government-led program that applies facial recognition. It also has a deal with the military police in Rio de Janeiro, to feed live footage and plate reads into their central command center, a hub the police say is equipped with facial-recognition software. “Gabriel is part of a larger ecosystem of surveillance,” says Jess Reia, assistant professor of data science and co-lead at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.
Surveillance initiatives always risk being abused, Reia says, pointing to how the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro allegedly used the country’s intelligence agency to spy on members of the judiciary, lawmakers, and journalists. “You can have things that are legal and look good on paper but they can be misused,” she says.
Coser says whether authorities use facial recognition isn’t his call. After sharing footage, “our part is over,” he says, adding what authorities do with it is “no longer in our control.”
And by passing footage to police rather than scanning them, Gabriel positions itself to avoid responsibility for the misidentifications that follow, says Pablo Nunes, director of the Center for Studies on Public Safety and Citizenship, a non-governmental organization based in Rio de Janeiro. When he tracked Brazil’s first facial-recognition arrests in 2019, about 90% of those he identified were Black. A 2025 report led by Nunes and produced with Brazil's federal public defender's office found facial recognition has spread rapidly across Brazil, operating with little regulation and no public error-reporting.
Privatizing public security has other trade-offs, Nunes says. Gabriel’s cameras are most common in richer areas. This, Nunes argues, allows a small, paying slice of the population to jump the queue for police attention. And although Gabriel has tapped into a widely shared concern among Brazilians over security, Nunes says homicide rates have dropped significantly in major Brazilian cities since 2017, with robberies following a similar downward trend. Nunes admits, despite raising concerns with neighbors, a Gabriel camera was recently installed on his building. “I lost the battle,” he says.
On stage, Coser cited New York and London as cities that used evidence to get on top of crime. He also said China, where he completed post-graduate studies, was a country Brazil ought to learn from. “The people in China who today have managed to develop the world’s best computer vision models are the same people whose grandfathers were starving two generations ago,” he told the audience.
China is, of course, an authoritarian state which has been criticized for maintaining a mass-surveillance system, while Brazil regained democracy in 1985 after two decades of military dictatorship. Coser says “there’s obviously bad stuff” in China, regarding surveillance technology.
But, he adds, when it comes to balancing privacy with public safety, “I think every society needs to have an adult conversation. We don't need to live in extremes.”