Atlanta-based neighborhood watch company Flock Safety has raised $47 million in a Series C round led by Meritech Capital.
Flock Safety works with neighborhoods and police departments to provide video evidence to help solve nonviolent crimes. The startup provides solar-powered camera systems to read license plates and car details in that neighborhood.
That footage goes into a cloud server, which can be accessed only by neighborhood residents and police departments. If a crime occurs in the neighborhood, the footage can help police narrow down vehicles that may have been involved. The footage could also help police locate stolen vehicles.
Flock Safety, which was founded in 2017 by CEO Garrett Langley, has cameras in more than 1,000 cities nationwide, according to a Nov. 2 press release, and it provides evidence for hundreds of cases every hour. The company manufactures hardware, creates software and provides maintenance for the Flock Safety cameras.
Alex Clayton, a general partner of Meritech Capital, will join Flock Safety’s board. Meritech joins Initialized Capital, Axon, Bedrock Capital, Matrix Partners, Founders Fund and Y-Combinator as investors in Flock Safety.
Josh Thomas, vice president of marketing at Flock Safety, said the company will use the funding to double their employees over the next six months.
Flock Safety has two locations to manufacture the hardware for the cameras, in Atlanta and North Carolina. The company plans to increase the distribution centers for those cameras and have more employees in their 25 markets across the nation, Thomas said.
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Thomas said Flock Safety is growing rapidly in Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis and Nashville, which is where Flock Safety plans to target its growth. Chicago and Indianapolis are other cities poised for expansion.
“It’s about us getting more people in those markets,” Thomas said. “We already have local technicians and local market managers, but we want everyone to have a full-service team in every single market across the country."
The company has positive feedback from partnering police departments, which say that the technology has allowed them to solve more crimes, and reduce crime in general.
Langley, who started Flock Safety after his car was stolen, said the company's goal is to create options for police to have more concrete evidence in property crimes. The cameras analyze information from the vehicle, including license plate number, make, model and other specific features, according to Thomas.
“We are very concerned about prejudice and bias, whether conscious or unconscious,” Thomas said. “That’s why we try to factor that out of the equation and just look at the vehicles there during the timeframe. Then the police can do their investigative duties and go and solve the crime.”
Anyone, from neighborhood homeowners associations to police departments to small business owners, can request a Flock Safety camera. The customer can choose how to securely view the footage, such as sending it directly to local police officers or designating a person in the neighborhood to view it. The footage is not reviewed or used by Flock Safety and gets deleted in 30 days, Thomas said.
Flock Safety raised $15.8 million earlier this year and previously raised $20 million in two funding rounds in 2018.
Flock Safety's $47 million funding raise was incorrectly identified as a Series B round in a previous version of this story.
