Think of Bethesda, Md.-based startup BlueLine Grid like the WhatsApp for police departments and U.S. intelligence agencies—but with a touch of Find My Friends.
Founded in 2013, the startup is starting to pick up steam with clients like the L.A. Police Department, the Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center and General Electric's security and emergency management teams who use the app to communicate with team members in security operations. BlueLine Grid now includes location-based communications using geofencing. One possible use could be if a police chief wanted to draw a parameter on a live map and communicate with all of the officers within it.
Each security team that uses BlueLine gets its own app. For example, search BlueLine Grid in the App Store, and you'll see an LAPD Grid, GE Grid and NVRIC Grid, among others. Now, before you get excited, not anyone can just join these teams by downloading the app and creating an account; administrators have to send a request and approve all new members.
To date, the startup has raised $4.98 million over four rounds since 2013, according to crunchbase, and the startup charges clients a subscription fee per user each month. The Bethesda office has 15 employees, mostly on the tech team.
"We saw a huge gap in the capabilities of the market, period," co-founder and CEO David Riker told DC Inno. "Following 9/11, the state of the art was sending an SMS to mass populations to alert them of a situation, and the state of technology has advanced very quickly in regards to the capabilities of the mobile phone.
"The ability to locate somebody is something we have taken advantage of in a way that nobody has done before to solve real problems."
Riker, who has a technology and startup background, founded the company with co-founders Jack Weiss, who has a background in policy and is president of the company, and Bill Bratton, who left the company shortly after its founding to run the NYPD. Originally, they were in New York City, but two years into building the company, they decided to move headquarters to Bethesda when they received an investment from Arlington's In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA.
"We have this incredible pool of talent from industries related to government that enable us to build real, mission critical, serious, hardcore technology right here in the D.C. area," Weiss told DC Inno. "We can take people who have been working on big, serious projects for a past couple years and put them in a new, cool startup environment and create a ton of new value."
In January, they added location-based communications to the app's features, improved one-click conference calling and made the onboarding process for new members more efficient (For example, now administrators can upload a .CSV file to onboard multiple people at the same time).
But moving forward, the team plans to focus on even more improvements to its apps and growing into new markets, such as attracting other Fortune 500 companies.
"People want the latest and greatest, and we are rapidly building our sales team to meet those needs," Weiss said.
Photos courtesy of BlueLine Grid
