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

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.