Jamie Siminoff is an inventor. This is how he defines himself even before claiming his title as CEO of Ring, the company he created in the early 2010s to “protect his neighborhood and reassure his wife,” but above all to hear the ringing of his garage in Los Angeles where he worked.
“I was missing my deliveries. I looked for a connected doorbell that would send the notification to my iPhone. And since it didn’t exist, I did it myself,” Jamie Siminoff simply summarizes. The self-taught inventor then worked on a prototype he called Doorbot, a door robot cobbled together from store-bought Wi-Fi components. It is his wife who will make him understand the value of what he has designed.
From robot doorman to security ring
Confident of his fact and his invention, but also of his security mission, he presents his project at the American fair shark tank (adapted in France under the name Who wants to be my investor?) and it’s a cold shower. Plateau investors are not convinced of the product’s potential. On the other hand, on the internet interest is increasing and success will be born from there.
The problem comes mainly from the name being “too technical and too cold”, its creator acknowledges. “I kept talking about creating a ‘safety ring’. A friend told me to just call it Ring and it worked. It’s simple, universal and fits well in the house.” With a new, more impactful name and a connected doorbell that reaches its audience, the home automation brand is taking off. Quickly, hundreds of thousands of units were sold and the concept became a reality: design a product to protect your home, but also the community with these security devices.
“Ring has never been just a camera company. Our idea, from day one, has been to build around community. Not just a product, but an ecosystem,” explains Jamie Siminoff. Today, Ring has surveillance cameras, video doorbells, alarms, etc., and still sees its customers primarily as “neighbors” who might need help. “The success of the name and the product comes from the fact that they stick to what we do and our mission: making neighborhoods safer,” he says. This is undoubtedly what will arouse the interest of Amazon which, in 2018, will spend more than a billion dollars to buy Ring. He will remain CEO until 2023 and wants to take a break.
AI, the trigger and the “new revolution”
Back at Ring since spring 2025, Siminoff says he has found the fervor and excitement of the beginning. “I was exhausted, I needed to breathe,” admits the now “chief inventor” of Ring. “Then artificial intelligence arrived and I realized we were entering a new era. I felt like I was back in my garage, all over again.”
For him, the arrival of AI in the home is a “revolution comparable to electricity.” “Saying there is too much AI is like saying, ‘Do we really need electricity in refrigerators?’ We have to rethink everything using AI,” he proclaims. And there is AI in new products introduced in early October by Amazon and Ring, particularly with the new “Search Party” feature that helps find lost animals by relying on Ring cameras in the neighborhood and community.
And in Jamie Siminoff’s vision of AI, there is obviously security in the neighborhood that can be strengthened. For several years, Ring has been testing multiple uses of its cameras in the United States, particularly with the Neighbors application, which allows residents and police to share real-time alerts with messages, videos or photos taken with home devices.
The company had also established partnerships with thousands of police agencies and fire departments that had equipped residents with cameras in exchange for access to their content during investigations, and had also created a program called “Community Requests” that allowed police to ask citizens to provide video in the event of an incident. Not everything has always been received with enthusiasm, and some practices raise, in particular, questions about respect for private life and racial discrimination. Amazon finally decided to back down.
Do everything possible to ensure that children grow up in safe places.
But Ring claims that these devices have helped reduce thefts in affected areas and solve more investigations. “If one day a certain percentage of households in a neighborhood use our tools, I believe we can reduce crime to zero. And if we do it in one neighborhood, we can do it in the next. It’s an infinite mission, but a beautiful mission,” prophecies Jamie Siminoff.
But he denies having created it to monitor. “Our mission has never changed: to help people feel safe, together. We create to protect, not to control,” insists the American. “If people don’t trust us, we won’t be able to build anything.” This also remains true with the use of AI, which must be “transparent and give control to users” to be credible.
A vision that combines technology, community and trust, which continues to animate you and Ring with its tens of millions of devices in homes around the world. And a dream that continues to carry him: to have 100% safe neighborhoods. “I want children to grow up in safer places. Because safer neighborhoods create better societies,” he confesses. “If we can do this, Ring will have truly changed the world.”
Source: BFM TV
