Everything has changed, and nothing has changed

Just over three years ago, Flock Safety set out with an ambitious mission — eliminate non-violent crime. Today marks a significant milestone. We have closed on a $47M round of funding led by Meritech Capital. My first thoughts are how both everything has changed and nothing has changed. For you, our customers and our team, this capital changes everything about our ability to create safer communities in every pocket of the country. But in the same breath, nothing has changed about our priority to protect the privacy of individuals, our focus on not just feeling safer but delivering results, and our drive to create a world-class public safety platform. With this capital and your continued support, Flock Safety will become synonymous with a massive reduction in crime across the country. I know it sounds audacious, but together, we can actually eliminate crime.

And it isn’t possible without you. I’m so thankful for our customers – neighborhoods, businesses, and police departments – in over 1,000 cities across the US. Some of you believed in us when we were soldering cameras together on my dining room table. We manually helped you pull the footage, give it to a detective, and solve the crime. Now, we provide evidence in hundreds of cases every hour of the day.

One of our first customers, Deputy Chief Stuart VanHoozer of Cobb County GA, sums it up:

“Flock Safety is the single best tool I have seen in 30 years – enabling true community policing. Flock unites us with our neighbors and businesses and directly develops leads we would not develop without this technology. 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.”

This is who we want to be for your community: a partner that is both building technology at a rapid pace while fostering a tighter relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

Thank you for sharing your success stories with us. It’s why we built the company, and it keeps the team energized every day. This newly raised capital changes everything by ensuring we always have the resources to support the public safety needs of every community across the country. But nothing has changed about our commitment to each individual customer. Whether you live in a twenty home cul-de-sac or you are the Chief of Police of a large city, we remain dedicated to helping you eliminate crime. And we take that responsibility seriously.

I’m so grateful to my founding team and early employees, most of whom I knew from Georgia Tech or previous companies. They took a chance on us because they wanted to be a part of the change. Like many of you, they wanted to use their skills and resources to build safer communities. Some of them literally interviewed at my home because we didn’t have an office. Now, we have a team spread across the entire country dedicated to our mission of eliminating crime. This newly raised capital changes everything by allowing us to hire the smartest, most creative, and most ethically-conscious people from all over the country. But it changes nothing about our culture. We will always stay committed to our values of Do the Work, Optimism with a Plan, and Change is the only Constant.

Flock Safety is personal to me. Like many of us, my car was stolen and that made our family feel violated and unsafe at home. Someone invaded our personal space and took something from us. The opportunity to commit crime is too easy and the information needed to stop crime is too vague. Flock Safety captures objective evidence, uses computer vision to make sense of the evidence, and pushes that evidence to the right person at the right time.

And in working to eliminate crime we have always prioritized two things:

1. Capturing the objective evidence needed to stop crime
2. Protecting individual privacy

Since day one of Flock Safety, we have limited who has access to the images and what they can do with it. We also permanently delete the images every 30 days by default on a rolling basis. Since then, we’ve developed tools that create more transparency and better auditing to ensure that people use the system as it was designed: to equitably and indiscriminately capture what matters (objective evidence) and delete what doesn’t (subjective descriptions).

But crime is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. And we need the best people working to solve it. I implore you to think about how you might help build a safer future. You see what’s happening in cities all over America. We need new, fresh ideas that tilt the scales for good. But even more than ideas, we need action. We need the brightest engineers, the best technicians, the most genuine account reps, and people from every walk of life to help us solve real problems that matter to real people (ps. we have open roles across the entire company, come join us!). With this new capital, we expect to double the size of our team in the coming year, launch multiple new products, and continue doing everything in our power to keep your community safe.

I’ll leave you with this. One of our newest customers, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Deputy Chief Valerie Cunningham, shares a sentiment that I want every community to experience. She says,

“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.”

We plan to keep your community safe for a long time. It has been an exhilarating journey up to this point. And the most exciting part is that we’re basically still in Chapter 1 of the Flock Safety story.

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.