Flock Safety has been a venture darling. Will data privacy controversies halt its rise?

Cat Gioino here.

Everyone wants safer neighborhoods, right? That was Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s pitch to VCs after he built Flock’s first prototype.

The Georgia Tech electrical engineer was not yet 30 when a string of break-ins in his own Atlanta neighborhood convinced him local police lacked the right tools.

Recruiting two former colleagues, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, he built what started at first a simple license-plate camera and has now expanded to include video, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-powered search software.

Launching Flock in his hometown of Atlanta in 2017, Langley promised to create a network of camera data that could be compiled together to solve any department’s cases.

Homeowners associations were the company’s earliest customers, all before law enforcement contracts came to dominate the business.

Today, the company operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states.

Flock told Fortune the company has since raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of this year.

Andreessen Horowitz was an early backer, leading Flock’s Series D in 2021, with a16z general partners David Ulevitch and David George calling the company an “n of 1″ startup,”effectively the only game in town.” Tiger Global led the Series E in February 2022, a $150 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, joined by new investors 776 and Spark Capital alongside returning backers a16z, Bedrock, Matrix, Meritech and Initialized.

By March 2025, Flock raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led again by a16z, with participation from Greenoaks, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Y Combinator.

But in recent months, Flock has been caught up in a swirl of intensifying controversy, with privacy experts and civil liberties groups alleging officers used the cameras to stalk people, including exes, or that departments shared data across jurisdictions, including with ICE and in violation of state law.

Vandalism has increased: across the country, people are dousing cameras in paint, ramming into them with their cars, smearing unknown substances across the camera front, or even chopping them down with chain saws, as documented in at least 36 states.

The biggest sticking point is who actually owns the data that Flock collects.

Flock says it’s its customers: the police departments, the HOAs, the private customers who hold that data for a certain amount of time, up to customer discretion.