Sauron wanted to ship its ultra‑premium home security system in early 2025. Instead, it’s heading into 2026 with a new CEO, no product on the market and a pile of hard decisions still on the whiteboard.
Maxime “Max” Bouvat‑Merlin, who spent nearly nine years at Sonos and rose to chief product officer, took the helm of Sauron last month. Speaking with TechCrunch, he was blunt about where things stand: the company is still deep in development, and the earliest customers will see anything installed in their homes is “later in 2026.”
“We’re in the development phase,” Bouvat‑Merlin said. “You’ll see a phased approach where we get our solution to market as a stepping stone.”
That phased plan is only now being locked in. Bouvat‑Merlin is spending his first weeks deciding which sensors Sauron will actually use, how its deterrence system should behave in the real world, and how fast a 40‑person startup can realistically move.
From a failed alarm to an $18M ‘super premium’ bet
Sauron was born out of a security failure in the heart of San Francisco’s tech scene.
One night, an intruder rang Kevin Hartz’s doorbell and tried to enter his San Francisco home. Hartz’s existing system didn’t alert him. The serial entrepreneur – whose resume includes Eventbrite and investment firm A* – decided the market simply wasn’t good enough.
His co‑founder Jack Abraham had similar complaints from his Miami Beach residence. Together with roboticist and engineer Vasumathi Raman, they launched Sauron in 2024, explicitly aiming to build what they pitched as a “military‑grade” home security system for tech elites.
The name is a deliberate nod to the all‑seeing eye from “The Lord of the Rings.”
The idea resonated in Bay Area circles where crime has become a constant talking point during and after the pandemic – even as San Francisco Police Department data shows property crime and homicide declined last year. Sauron quickly raised $18 million from executives behind Flock Safety and Palantir, from defense‑tech investors including 8VC, from Abraham’s startup studio Atomic, and from Hartz’s firm A*.
The company came out of stealth a year ago promising a launch in the first quarter of 2025. That is no longer on the table.
Why a Sonos product chief thinks Sauron feels familiar
On paper, going from multiroom speakers to militarized home security looks like a hard pivot. Bouvat‑Merlin argues the playbook is surprisingly similar.
He points to three parallels: both Sonos and Sauron target affluent users first, rely heavily on word‑of‑mouth and channel partners, and have to marry complex hardware with sophisticated software and services.
“I had lunch with John MacFarlane, the founder of Sonos, a few weeks ago,” Bouvat‑Merlin said. “All the topics he was thinking about when starting Sonos were exactly the same topics we’re discussing at Sauron.”
In both cases, the team has to answer the same strategic questions: start with “super premium” or go straight to mass premium? Rely on professional installation or DIY? Build every component in‑house or lean on an ecosystem of partners?
“We might make different decisions, but the questions are very similar,” he said.
What Sauron is actually building (so far)
Ask Bouvat‑Merlin what Sauron is building, and the answer is still shifting.
The core idea starts with “camera pods” that bundle multiple sensing modalities.
“Forty cameras and different types of sensors, potentially LiDAR and radar, potentially thermal,” he said.
Those pods will connect back to servers running Sauron’s machine‑learning computer vision stack. On top of that sits a 24/7 concierge and monitoring layer staffed by former military and law‑enforcement personnel.
“Those people understand patterns,” Bouvat‑Merlin said. “They’re good at helping us mature our machine learning solution and train our system to detect weird behaviors.”
The deterrence layer is the vaguest part of the stack. Sauron is exploring loudspeakers, flashing lights and other ways to convince would‑be intruders they have picked the wrong house – ideally before they even step onto the property.
The goal is to spot early‑stage signals: someone surveilling a home, a car circling a block multiple times, behavior that looks just off enough to warrant a warning.
“The more upfront we are with deterrence, the more we can convince people this is the wrong house to rob and the wrong decision to make,” he said.
When Sauron first emerged, its founders also talked up drones as part of the vision. Bouvat‑Merlin isn’t eager to expand on that.
“These are roadmap conversations. I don’t want to go too deep at this point because there are so many things we could do, but we’re such a small company,” he said.
Zooming out, he stresses that Sauron will try to grow via partnerships rather than “reinventing the wheel” for every component.
Small team, long runway, late 2026 pilots
Today, Sauron has fewer than 40 employees. Headcount growth will be modest: the plan is to add just 10 to 12 more people in 2026.
That same year, Sauron wants to begin working with early adopters and raise a Series A around mid‑year.
“Raising a Series A is not about raising because we have to — it’s because we want to,” Bouvat‑Merlin said. “I want to make sure we’re showing progress and explaining how we’ll use extra funds to accelerate growth, [including to] launch our first end‑to‑end product, drive customer adoption, and accelerate the roadmap.”
He says the founders’ networks have already produced a “significant list” of prospective customers. The initial go‑to‑market will be heavily word‑of‑mouth, then broaden out over time.
Bouvat‑Merlin is wary of scaling too fast.
“I want to make sure we grow sustainably and keep the experience and service premium over time,” he said. “I want to manage growing pains as much as possible while driving profitability.”
On the operations side, Sauron still has to finalize everything from sensor configurations to manufacturing geography. Bouvat‑Merlin floated a familiar hardware pattern: start building in the U.S. for proximity and control, then shift some production to lower‑cost locations once volumes ramp.
Another open question: how to serve wildly different customer environments, from gated estates with long perimeters to dense urban homes, without diluting service levels.
Broken alarms, false positives and anxious rich people
For Bouvat‑Merlin, the appeal of Sauron is partly mission, partly an obvious product gap.
He argues that even the “premium” incumbents have low market share and disgruntled users.
“People are not happy with their solutions today,” he said. “There are so many false positives that when law enforcement is called, they don’t respond because they assume it’s a false alarm.”
Sauron’s first customers will be people “where safety and security is a major concern” – essentially, the Kevin Hartz demographic. If that works, the company wants to expand beyond “super premium” into what Bouvat‑Merlin calls “mass premium.”
The timing is no accident. High‑profile incidents have put wealthy households on edge. One example Bouvat‑Merlin cites: a November armed robbery at the San Francisco Mission District home of tech investors Lachy Groom and Joshua Buckley, where attackers stole $11 million in cryptocurrency during a 90‑minute ordeal involving torture and threats.
“We see people who are wealthy attracting criminals,” Bouvat‑Merlin said. “We’ve seen a lot of robberies in San Francisco and other major U.S. cities, sometimes at gunpoint. I don’t think the world is getting safer — there are probably more disparities between people at the top and bottom of the wealth spectrum. We see anxiety from prospective clients who are eager to get their homes secured.”
Walking the line between security and surveillance
A system named after a fantasy‑world surveillance icon was always going to face questions about privacy and civil liberties.
Facial recognition is one of those pressure points. Bouvat‑Merlin sketches a “trust‑based” model built around explicit access lists rather than blanket scanning.
“I granted you access to my house, so now you’re in the trusted group. When you come, I detect it’s you and you’re allowed in. Everyone else is an unknown person,” he said.
The company is also exploring license‑plate detection to spot suspicious driving patterns, like cars circling a neighborhood. The same ex‑military and ex‑law‑enforcement staff who handle monitoring will help train the machine‑learning models on what constitutes a real threat.
“The ex‑military and ex‑law enforcement team will be really good at helping mature our machine learning solution,” Bouvat‑Merlin said.
Bouvat‑Merlin argues that Sauron’s origin as a tech startup – rather than a traditional alarm vendor trying to bolt on cloud and AI – gives it an edge.
“A lot of companies started as traditional security companies and are trying to add tech,” he said. “We’re looking at it from the opposite angle — we’re a tech startup in San Francisco bringing technology to this market.”
Still more questions than answers
For now, Sauron is more roadmap than reality. The company hasn’t finalized its sensor stack, deterrence playbook, manufacturing footprint or installation model. It has a new CEO, a slide deck full of anxious would‑be customers and a launch window that now stretches into late 2026.
Inside the company, Bouvat‑Merlin says his focus is basic but essential: listening, earning trust and turning a sprawling ambition into a concrete plan.
“I don’t demand that people trust me — I want to show them why they should,” he said.
Sauron expects to share more product details later next year. The rich, for now, will have to keep making do with the imperfect security systems they already love to hate.
