This article was adapted from our latest investigation, produced in partnership with Type Investigations: A Mexican surveillance giant you’ve never heard of is now watching the U.S. border.

Grupo Seguritech was founded in Mexico City in 1995 by father-son duo Shimon and Ariel Picker as a small company selling alarm systems for homes. 

The company’s first foray into government work was installing a network of municipal security cameras, according to Seguritech’s website. By 2004, the company had installed its first video surveillance center. And in 2013, it designed Mexico’s first C5 command center, a type of facility that connects local, regional, and federal law enforcement agencies and integrates intelligence gathering with public emergency services.

What does Grupo Seguritech do?

Today, Grupo Seguritech does work in a variety of fields. It has established prison surveillance systems and provided drones and tactical vehicles to government partners. It has received a government contract for meteorological radars, and built an aerospace division called SeguriSpace that launched 18 satellites into orbit for meteorology work. 

Seguritech’s bread and butter, though, is its top-to-bottom surveillance packages, which it helped pioneer in Mexico. Government contracts obtained via public records requests show that alongside constructing command centers, the company and its subsidiaries design intelligence gathering and sharing systems, procuring the necessary equipment — cameras, drones, license plate readers, and computer software — or supplying their own equipment.

“We look for the best practices and technologies and we integrate them,” Picker had said in a TV interview from about a decade ago. “So we look for the best video camera system with the best software, the best turnstiles, the best software for access control, the best fiber, the best installation practices.”

Seguritech’s subsidiaries 

Grupo Seguritech does not list all of its subsidiaries publicly. However, internal company documents obtained by Rest of World and Type Investigations list 27 subsidiaries under the Grupo Seguritech umbrella, most of which operate in the security field and are based in Mexico. Public records revealed at least three more branches of Seguritech outside of Mexico.

How big is Grupo Seguritech?

In its statement, Seguritech said the company employs more than 2,200 “specialists” around the country, who are currently working on 52 active projects. The company did not share further details about the size of its operations.

One of its largest projects, Plataforma Centinela (“sentinel platform”), brings together thousands of cameras, license plate readers, drones, helicopters, and other intelligence-gathering technology to enable authorities to keep watch over vast swaths of the state. The platform is deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border, and a 20-floor tower is currently being built in downtown Juárez.