Bosch has closed its AI-powered, internet-connected camera app store.

Bosch spokesperson stated in a statement that Azena will "fully honor" its existing contractual obligations and that partners and customers have been informed.

Bosch has closed its AI-powered, internet-connected camera app store.

Security and Safety Things (or "SAST" for short) was founded in 2018 by the appliance conglomerate Bosch. Its stated goal was to develop a platform that would assist developers in creating software for AI-equipped cameras.SAST was to have a directed, checked "application store" for web associated cameras that would permit engineers to construct programming on an open norm — programming fundamentally centered around security and "business insight" use cases.

The app store was successfully launched in 2020 by SAST, which later changed its name to Azena and established a headquarters in Pittsburgh's Strip District.However, despite receiving tens of millions of euros in investment from Bosch, SAST, which is now Azena, did not seem to achieve the level of success that its parent company had hoped for.

Azena will focus on Bosch's internal projects instead of its external operations.A Bosch spokesperson stated in a statement that Azena will "fully honor" its existing contractual obligations and that partners and customers have been informed.

"Azena will stop developing external business in the future and concentrate on internal Bosch business.This includes limiting maintenance and support to [Azena's software] only," the spokesperson wrote in an email.We are actively developing a plan for the transition. For the time being, all Azena platform components remain operational.

By IP camera market standards, Azena's marketplace had approximately 100 apps at its peak.It allowed developers to sell their apps to customers and provide demos for pilot projects, similar to popular smartphone app stores.Azena had also been developing an operating system for cameras that enabled supported models to run multiple AI-enabled apps simultaneously. Prior to its partial shutdown, the app store would handle backing up and restoring settings and ensuring that configurations remained consistent across cameras.Cameras with the firmware were sold by manufacturers like Qisda/Topview, AndroVideo, Vivotek, and Bosch itself. 

The cameras were built on top of Android and powered apps like automated payment processing, license plate recognition, heat mapping, and queue analysis in retail stores.

Azena had more than 120 employees as of September 2021, spread out across its Munich offices, Pittsburgh facility, and Eindhoven, The Netherlands, R&D hub. The Pittsburgh Penguins, a professional hockey team in the National Hockey League, are one of the startups' customers. They used the Azena platform to monitor crowding at stadium entrances, recognize license plates, and identify overcrowding near retail locations for fan merchandise.

When it was discovered earlier this year that Azena was only performing basic auditing of the software hosted in its app store, the company sparked controversy. The terms of service of the company stated that users and developers were solely accountable for the apps' ethical and legality. Many ethicists contend that the applications that some apps claimed to be able to accurately detect weapons and analyze human behavior are beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced AI systems.

At the time, Azena made it clear in a public response that it required platform developers to pledge to adhere to the UN's ethical business standards. However, the startup acknowledged that it was unable to examine the usage of Azena-powered cameras or the legality or compliance with developer agreements of apps sold on its store.

The Intercept's investigation also found evidence that Azena had been patching security flaws that could have given hackers access to cameras running its operating system for years. Azena questioned the idea however recognized that Azena's firmware allowed clients to sideload applications beyond the application store onto upheld cameras