Bunker Labs: Tell us a little about your background.
Mike Lahiff: I grew up in the Philly area, graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School in ’99, then I went to Slippery Rock University. I’d always been fascinated with the military since a young age, particularly with the Navy SEALs. After 9/11 happened, I joined the Navy and made my goal to become a SEAL. I was in the Navy for ten and a half years, deployed in multiple places and spent a lot of time overseas.
After ten years, I decided to retire from the Navy because I had a family at home that I didn’t get to see very much. I was interested in studying business, so I applied to Wharton at Penn and was fortunate enough to get accepted. I worked at Comcast as the Director of Digital Program Management before joining ZeroEyes.
BL: What is ZeroEyes, and what do they do?
ML: The company was founded two years ago by Al Shore, also a Navy veteran. Al came up with this idea to use artificial intelligence to connect pieces of data to process images and videos.
The company was still in ideation stage when I was brought onboard in the spring of 2018. A friend of mine from SEAL training who was working with ZeroEyes called me and told me to check out the company. I saw a lot of potential for the software to be trained to recognize weaponry, to be used in schools and public places as another layer of security.