FLOCK SAFETY RAISES $47M IN SERIES C FUNDING TO ELIMINATE CRIME WITHIN A PRIVACY-FIRST FRAMEWORK
Atlanta, GA, Nov. 02, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Flock Safety, a public safety-as-a-service company that builds ethically-designed crime-solving technology, announced today a $47 million Series C. The round was led by Meritech Capital and the funding round more than doubles the capital that Flock Safety has raised to-date, from a little over $30 million to over $80 million. Flock Safety has crime-solving technology deployed with neighborhoods, small businesses, and law enforcement in over 1,000 cities across the US and provides the evidence for police to solve hundreds of crimes every hour, including a recent kidnapping of a one-year old boy.
According to the FBI, there are nearly 7,000,000 annual property crimes and fewer than 20% of those crimes have enough evidence for police to solve. Flock Safety built a suite of hardware and software products for neighborhoods, businesses, police, and cities who want to work together to capture the objective evidence needed to stop crime.
“Flock Safety has proven a valuable investigative tool,” said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Deputy Chief Valerie Cunningham. “Since the first few minutes of having access to Flock Safety technology, officers and detectives were able to leverage the technology to locate wanted vehicles and subjects creating a much safer Indianapolis. We look forward to a long partnership with this leading-edge technology company.”
All Flock Safety products and services are built with privacy-first policies like, by default, automatically deleting the footage every 30 days and never sharing with third parties or selling the data. All footage is encrypted and securely stored in the cloud. The cameras are not used for traffic enforcement, nor immigration enforcement, and there is no facial recognition technology. Flock Safety technology adheres to state and local laws on data retention and user access.
Flock Safety’s first product was a license plate reading camera built specifically for neighborhoods. The technology company has since expanded the suite of products to include better ways to collect objective evidence, gain insights from that evidence, and send that evidence to the right detective at the right time. The Wing integration, launched in early October, is one such product that transforms hours of IP camera video footage into searchable evidence, letting a detective find a suspect vehicle by make, model, color, or unique features like roof rack, trailer hitch, tinted windows, and more.
“Crime is an incredibly hard problem to solve,” said Garrett Langley, Flock Safety founder and CEO. “Since nearly 70% of crime happens with a vehicle, machine learning and computer vision can capture objective evidence, like vehicle details, to help communities give a detective the lead needed to solve crime. We plan to use this capital to hire the smartest and most ethically-conscious people to help us achieve our mission of eliminating crime. Across engineering, sales, and customer-focused roles, the company will at least double in size next year.”
Flock Safety technology already helps police drop crime rates and recover stolen property for neighborhoods, businesses, and police departments in more than 1,000 cities across the US.
“Flock Safety provides the single best tool I have seen in 30 years - enabling true community policing,” said Cobb County, GA Assistant Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer. “Flock unites us with our neighbors and businesses and directly develops leads we would not develop without this technology. With Flock in our highest crime communities, we saw sustained drops in criminal activity of 30% to 60% in both property and violent crime. Since I first met the Flock Safety team two years ago, they have been relentless in finding innovative ways for communities to come together and eliminate crime.”
The funding round was led by Meritech Capital, and general partner Alex Clayton will join the Flock Safety board alongside Ilya Sukhar of Matrix Partners. New investors include Julia and Kevin Hartz, co-founders of Eventbrite, and Zac Bookman of OpenGov, and previous investors Initialized Capital, Axon, Bedrock Capital, Matrix Partners, Founders Fund, and Y-Combinator also participated.
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ABOUT FLOCK SAFETY
Flock Safety is a public safety-as-a-service company for neighborhoods, law enforcement, and cities who want the whole community to work together in building a safer future. When communities decide how they want to live, they choose to partner with their local law enforcement in delivering better objective evidence, real results, and privacy-first technology. Flock Safety serves 1000 cities in 38 states and helps police solve dozens of crimes daily. Learn more at www.flocksafety.com
ABOUT MERITECH CAPITAL PARTNERS
Meritech Capital Partners is a leading provider of late-stage venture capital to category-defining private technology companies, and has been one of the top performing venture firms of the past two decades. The firm was founded in 1999 and has cumulatively managed almost $4 billion in total capital. Past and present investments include Alteryx, Anaplan, Braze, Coupa, Datadog, Facebook, Looker, MuleSoft, NetSuite, Outreach, Proofpoint, Roblox, Salesforce, Segment, Snowflake, Tableau and UiPath. The firm has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA and can be found at www.meritechcapital.com.
CONTACT: Joshua Miller
Flock Safety
404.947.7273
joshua.miller@flocksafety.com