In 2023, Jamie Siminoff called up Amazon 's former devices boss, Dave Limp, to say he was stepping down from leading the video doorbell company he sold to the e-commerce giant for $839 million in 2018.
Siminoff, who started Ring in 2013, said Limp and Amazon offered him the opportunity to work elsewhere at the company, but he declined.
"I said, 'I think I have to leave,'" Siminoff recalled in an interview on Monday. "I don't think I can be half in. I'm either all in or I'm all out."
He wasn't gone for long.
In April, Siminoff announced his return to Ring, replacing Liz Hamren, a former Microsoft and Discord executive whom Amazon had hired to succeed him. Now that he's back at the helm, Siminoff says he's restoring Ring's original mission, to "make neighborhoods safer."
And now his team has even more artificial intelligence technology at its disposal to supercharge those efforts.
Siminoff took the stage Tuesday at Amazon's annual hardware event in New York to debut new Ring cameras, along with a feature called Search Party that uses AI to identify potential matches in camera footage. It's aimed at "reuniting lost dogs" with their families, but Siminoff said there could be other applications in the future.