Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation.

Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition tech, but Flock also makes gunshot detection tech marketed to schools, and recently acquired public safety drone company Aerodome.

Flock was founded in 2017 and went through Y Combinator that same year. Growth exploded in the subsequent years. Flock crossed over $300 million in annual recurring revenue last year, which is 70% year-over-year growth, Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin told TechCrunch.

The Atlanta-based startup has now raised over $950 million in total funding, according to PitchBook data, and its last valuation a year ago was $4.8 billion. Return investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greenoaks, Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, and Y Combinator participated in this round.

Given that it makes surveillance tech, Flock has unsurprisingly had its share of controversies. For instance, the ACLU cited concerns with Flock over the kind of mass surveillance it enables and, a year ago, urged the company to allow independent review of its products. Privacy advocates in Norfolk, Virginia are currently suing to stop Flock from being deployed there.

Flock is also facing a wrongful termination lawsuit from a sitting mayor of a small California town, as TechCrunch recently reported.

That said, Flock has been a VC darling for years.

For instance, Bedrock’s founder, Geoff Lewis, recounted how he flew to Atlanta in 2018 to beg Flock co-founder Garrett Langley (pictured above) to take a $10 million Series A-1, one of the first checks from Lewis’ new firm. But Langley had just closed Flock’s Series A.

That deal was a “totally insane” $60 million valuation, as Bedrock described it — about triple the valuation of the A round just a few months earlier. Langley took the money — and has gone on to take more than $164 million in investments from Bedrock since.

By the way, Lewis, who hailed from Founders Fund, now has other big names in Bedrock’s portfolio, like OpenAI, Rippling, and Mach Industries.

Meanwhile, a16z’s American Dynamism fund lead, David Ulevitch, led other rounds for Flock. “Beyond protecting property, Flock Safety is literally helping to save lives,” Ulevitch and a16z growth VC David George opined in 2021.

YC’s Garry Tan took to LinkedIn just a few months ago to applaud the success rate Flock claims it has achieved in fighting crime.

But it’s Flock’s revenue growth, in addition to its public safety products, that’s caused investors to “continue to double and triple down on Flock,” Beilin said.