On the heels of a substantial funding round, neighborhood safety camera startup Flock Safety is looking to expand — and quickly. At the end of last month, Flock raised $9.59 million in outside funding from 20 investors, according to Crunchbase data.
Those investors include Ilya Sukhar, the founder of mobile platform Parse, which was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Sukhar, who is now a partner at early-stage VC firm Matrix Partners, has also joined Flock as the only non-founder on its Board.
Co-founder and CEO Garrett Langley says that Sukhar shares a “common vision” with the Flock team that IoT products must be paired with actionable insights in order to make them useful.
“There’s a huge number of sensors out there in the wild, but most of them aren’t doing anything beyond data analytics,” says Langley. “Most of those aren’t being used for anything immediately.”
Flock’s camera and accompanying software is geared towards private neighborhoods and neighborhood associations looking to decrease petty crime. The cameras provide advanced monitoring using machine learning to adapt to the specific conditions wherever they’re placed.
When a crime victim wants to obtain footage that can be given to law enforcement, Flock’s platform and advanced search algorithms allow them to narrow down the search by color of the car, time of day and more factors.
The startup produces the cameras in-house in their office, and production has increased by two-fold from spring 2018. They are putting together about 100 cameras per month, and Langley says that, on average, they’re providing neighborhoods and law enforcement with evidence to solve crimes about once a day.
“We’re looking at, have the police been given everything they need to do their job,” explains Langley. He cites that 80 percent of petty crimes go unsolved due to lack of evidence, a problem Flock aims to solve.
Flock currently has just over 20 employees, up from 10 when they spoke to Hype in April. Langley says they are now looking to add 30-40 spots over the next six months, spread evenly across sales, engineering, marketing and customer success.
To accommodate their growth, Flock will move this month to a new office in Atlanta’s West Midtown neighborhood, which Langley says has room to accommodate 50-60.
Flock formerly received a small infusion of capital from the Y Combinator accelerator, but this is their first major funding round. Langley says they will have to raise again, but likely not for at least two years.
