Flock Safety is the Blazer winner of the hardware category in Atlanta Inno's Fire Awards.
Founded in 2017, this startup works with neighborhoods and police departments to provide video evidence to help solve crimes. It provides solar-powered camera systems to read license plates and car details in neighborhoods that had property crimes. In July, Flock Safety reached a $1 billion valuation after a $150 million raise. It aims to help lower the rising crime in Atlanta and around the country.
Here's a Q&A with CEO Garrett Langley:
Q: How are your company’s innovations changing your industry’s landscape?
A: I founded Flock Safety after experiencing the unnerving circumstance of my family becoming a victim of a crime. I reported the crime to local law enforcement, only to learn that over 85% of property crime is never solved due to lack of evidence. Around the same time, I learned that seven in 10 crimes are committed with a vehicle. There were simply no affordable, accessible tools on the market to help communities and law enforcement obtain objective, accurate crime leads — like a suspect’s license plate.
Today, Flock Safety has filled that gap in the market by providing machine learning-powered technology that helps communities, businesses, law enforcement and public officials in over 1,200 cities work together in the pursuit of crime reduction. Our tools have been shown to reduce crime by up to 70%, and we are helping solve hundreds of crimes per day.
Q: What’s your advice to future and current entrepreneurs?
A: My best advice to entrepreneurs is in order to innovate you need laser focus on a mission. For me, that’s eliminating crime, but every entrepreneur will have their own guidepost. You need dedication, persistence, a willingness to do the tasks nobody else wants to do, and the ability to accept being uncomfortable to grow.
Q: What’s been the biggest roadblock in your growth and how did you overcome it?
A: Like many entrepreneurs, I’ve gone through tough times as we’ve scaled the business. But the biggest roadblock we face at Flock Safety is the sheer novelty of what we are doing. Nobody has ever approached the mission of solving crime in the way that we do, with a multi-pronged approach of bringing diverse stakeholders together from the private and public sector around state-of-the-art, ethically engineered technology. We overcome this challenge every day with education — we educate our future and current customers, the media, the public, and ourselves. Truly disruptive companies do not improve on an existing market, they create an entirely new category — and that is what we are doing for the public safety sector at Flock.
Atlanta Inno's Fire Awards 2021
Yieldi grew 300% in 2020, a year after its founding.
BitPay has processed more than $5 billion in transactions and has more than $70 million in investments, including from Silicon Valley’s Founders Fund.
FilmHedge provides fixed-interest loans and lines of credit to finance movie and TV productions through an online application.
LendingPoint scored a $125 million investment from Warburg Pincus earlier this year and has more than 300 employees.
Founded in 2007, Bluefin raised $25 million at the end of last year to expand its geographical reach, which already includes 130 partners across 32 countries.
Buckle raised a $31 million Series A round and bought Gateway Insurance Company to expand into 47 states in 2020.
In 2020, MAXEX tripled its annual volume and expects the growth to continue this year.
Curricula, an Atlanta Tech Village startup, raised $3 million last year to expand its team to 30 and released a new product earlier this year
Featurespace raised $37.4 million in 2020 to fuel its expansion into Singapore. The Technology Association of Georgia named it an innovative company of the year.
Oversight, which has more than 200 enterprise partners, made the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2020 Pacesetter Awards list and garnered recognition from TAG for its innovation.
Hermeus is leasing a 110,000-square-foot space in Doraville for its headquarters and aircraft assembly factory and raised a $16 million round last fall.
Nexus Fuels, backed by Cox Enterprises' Cleantech division, has produced about 310,000 gallons of oil and diverted more than 2.7 million pounds of plastic from the landfill.
Flock Safety raised $47 million last year and aims to help lower the city’s rising crime.
Earlier this year, Valor closed its second, $21 million fund, which includes investments in Physician360 and LeaseQuery.
This seed-stage investment firm closed its first fund of $27 million earlier this year, surpassing its initial goal.
This early-stage investment firm launched at the end of the last year to help grow tech-enabled companies founded by veteran entrepreneurs in the Southeast.
Zane Venture Fund has investments from Calendly CEO Tope Awotona and Sig Mosley, the “Godfather of Angel Investing.”
The goal for Panoramic Ventures' first fund is $300 million, and the firm has a team of more than 25.
iFOLIO, which is hiring, has more than 5,350 clients, including Madison Square Garden and Atlanta Falcons.
Backed by Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban and Atlanta Ventures, Offbeat Media Group is using innovative marketing strategies to help brands advertise on social media.
Terminus raised $90 million and plans to increase its 200-person team to 250. It’s made four acquisitions in past three years.
Founded in 2015, inBrain is the second fastest-growing company on University of Georgia’s 2021 Bulldog 100 list.
The Desire Co., founded in 2015, has $4 million in investments and grew its team by 41% in the past year.
Founded in 2011, DecisionLink raised $18.5 million from prominent Silicon Valley firm Accel at the beginning of this year.
LeaseQuery, which was bootstrapped until 2019, is backed by Goldman Sachs and consistently garners local recognition for its fast growth.
In 2020, M3 updated products to include work-from-home accessibility and added 61 new customers.
11Ten Innovation Partners was named an Atlanta Business Chronicle 2021 Pacesetter and has partnerships with Emory Healthcare Innovation Hub and the Verizon 5G Innovation Hub.
Speedscale, backed by Silicon Valley’s Y-Combinator and Atlanta’s Tech Square Ventures, prevents product incidents in programmers’ code through automation.
In 2020, PadSplit raised $10 million and is expanding into other cities.
Empowrd completed the 2021 Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator this year.
This fintech company, backed by Valor Ventures, wants to close the gap for the unbanked or underbanked population.
A partner of the Atlanta Braves, PrizePicks is the closest legal alternative to legal mobile sports betting in many areas across the country.
Founded in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X program, Stord raised $100 million from West Coast investors and bought transportation provider Cove Logistics this past year.
Verusen raised $8 million earlier this year after seeing massive growth in 2020 because of an increase in demand due to the pandemic
Saltbox raised a $10.6 million round to expand into more cities around the U.S. and add 50 people to its team.
SalesLoft hit unicorn status at the beginning of 2021 with a $100 million round.
Gimme released a new product late last year and saw an increase in demand during the pandemic as companies looked for technology to better manage their supply chains.
As delivery demand increased because the pandemic, Roadie launched their services to 3,000 new stores in two months.
Greenlight Financial Technology raised $260 million in May 2021, tripled its year-over-year revenue in 2020 and plans to hire 300 employees in the next two years.
Calendly raised a $350 million investment earlier this year, putting its valuation at more than $3 billion.
OneTrust raised $210 million in April and has bought three companies in the last five months.
PPRO opened its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta in 2017. In 2021, it became a unicorn with a $180 million round.
Atlanta Tech Village opened their doors back to entrepreneurs in May 2020 and kept all 300 company tenants throughout the pandemic.
Tech Alpharetta has more than 50 mentors and has 15 startup graduates, mostly in technical software sectors.
The Gathering Spot connected members digitally through a program called “Circles” and increased its membership during the pandemic. The club is expanding into Washington D.C. and Los Angeles.
