Garrett Langley is the co-founder and CEO of Flock Safety, the Atlanta-headquartered public safety technology company valued at $8.4 billion as of April 2026. Founded in 2017 alongside Matt Feury and Paige Todd — all three Georgia Tech alumni — Flock has raised close to $1 billion in total funding, generates more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and operates in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. Langley, a Georgia Tech electrical engineer who previously helped sell live-events platform Experience to Cox Enterprises for $200 million, has built the country’s most consequential — and most contested — private surveillance network from a converted warehouse on Howell Mill Road.
Who is Garrett Langley
Langley earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with Highest Honors from Georgia Tech in 2009, with a focus on digital signal processing and bioengineering. He has stayed close to the school ever since: he sits on the advisory board of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and remains an active alumnus.
Before Flock, Langley worked as an electrical engineer and then as a startup operator. He spent time at Clutch, an early monthly car subscription service, then joined Experience, a mobile platform for live sports and concert seat upgrades. He played a lead role in selling Experience to Cox Enterprises in 2014 in a deal reported at approximately $200 million. That exit gave him capital, conviction, and — critically — the working relationship with Matt Feury and Paige Todd that would become Flock Safety three years later.
The founding team had an unusual feature for a law-enforcement technology company: zero law-enforcement experience. Langley has described that as a strength. They approached policing the way a consumer-software founder would approach any opaque, paper-bound industry: by asking why the data was so bad and whether the price-per-unit could be cut by an order of magnitude.
The origin of Flock Safety
The trigger was a property crime at Langley’s own home in Atlanta. A break-in left him with no usable evidence and a frank conversation with detectives who told him the single most useful thing in a neighborhood crime case is a license plate — and that legacy automated license plate readers (ALPRs) cost so much that no city could afford to blanket a county with them.
Langley, Feury, and Todd built the first prototype around an Android phone in a waterproof box, photographing passing vehicles and extracting plate numbers through a homebrew app. By 2017 the company was incorporated, and by 2018 it was inside Y Combinator’s batch — a credential that mattered, given the company’s later defenders and critics would both reach for it.
The founder split has held remarkably steady. Langley is CEO, Feury is CTO, and Todd serves as Chief People Officer — a role that has shaped the company’s culture argument for nearly a decade.
“If you look at the core premise of America, it’s economic mobility. You have to have food, you have to have shelter, you have to be safe. If you don’t have a bedrock of safety in your life, none of the other things matter.”
— Garrett Langley, speaking on Andreessen Horowitz podcast content, 2025
How Flock Safety became Atlanta’s surveillance unicorn
The growth curve has been steep, and it has been almost entirely demand-pulled. Cities, HOAs, and police departments came looking for cameras after seeing them work in a neighboring jurisdiction. Flock added new product lines on top of the original ALPR business at a steady cadence — gunshot detection, AI-powered video search, real-time crime center software (FlockOS), and, in 2024, drones.
The October 2024 acquisition of Aerodome, a Drone-as-First-Responder company, for a reported $300 million was a step-change. It brought Flock into the air, gave it a manufacturing roadmap for National Defense Authorization Act-compliant drones, and set a public target of “100 drone cities” by the end of 2026. By October 2025 the company had launched its own Alpha drone for first responders and a private-sector Drone-as-Automated-Security product.
The funding history tracks the product expansion almost beat for beat:
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2017–2018 | ~$10M | Y Combinator, Initialized, Founders Fund |
| Series A | November 2018 | $10M | Matrix Partners, Bedrock |
| Series B | April 2020 | $15.9M | — |
| Series C | November 2020 | $47M | Initialized Capital |
| Series D | July 2021 | $150M | — |
| Series E | February 2022 | $150M | — |
| Series F | March 2025 | $275M | Andreessen Horowitz, Bedrock |
| Tender offer | April 2026 | ~$200M new shares authorized | Existing investors |
Total raised: approximately $1 billion. The April 2026 tender authorized roughly $200 million in new shares at a per-share price about 6% above the March 2025 round — the move that established the $8.4 billion valuation.
Flock Safety is one of six active Atlanta unicorns as of May 2026. See our complete list for the full ecosystem context, including how Flock compares to Calendly, OneTrust, Greenlight, Stord, and Hermeus. For granular round-by-round detail on Atlanta funding activity, see our Atlanta Startup Funding Tracker.
The $8.4B inflection point
The April 2026 tender offer is best read as a private-market signal rather than a capital event. The company did not need primary capital — at more than $300 million in ARR it generates real revenue — so the structure (authorizing roughly $200 million in new shares for existing investors and employees to transact against) is a liquidity mechanism. It also locks in a valuation step-up: from $4.8 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in March 2025 to $8.4 billion thirteen months later.
That growth trajectory is what underwrites the IPO speculation that has shadowed Flock since the Series F. The company has not announced a public-offering timeline. It has, however, built the disclosure discipline, the revenue base, and the customer footprint — over 5,000 communities, over 4,500 law-enforcement agencies, and roughly 1,478 employees per PitchBook’s May 2026 count — that an underwriter would expect.
Langley’s framing of the round, in the AJC, was Atlanta-first: he called the funding “a testament to the quality and sophistication of the technology ecosystem in Atlanta.” Flock has matched the rhetoric with real estate. The company is doubling its Atlanta office footprint and moving its headquarters to The Medici building on Howell Mill Road, anchoring it firmly in West Midtown.
Operating at the center of the surveillance debate
No honest profile of Flock Safety can avoid the controversy. The same product that has solved high-profile cases — including the apprehension of the Brown shooting suspect in late 2025 — has also become the most-litigated, most-protested private surveillance system in the country. The criticisms break into three buckets, and Langley has answered all three in public.
The first is the architecture itself. The American Civil Liberties Union has argued that Flock’s national network — police departments sharing plate data with other departments across state lines, plus a new generation of products that pair ALPR hits with commercial data-broker records — amounts to “a giant nationwide warrantless surveillance infrastructure.” Civil-liberties groups have flagged the company’s terms of service, which grant Flock a perpetual right to use customer data to “support and improve” its services even after a customer terminates.
The second is immigration enforcement. In May 2025, reporting from 404 Media surfaced that local police were performing Flock searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; later investigations in Virginia, Washington state, and California found thousands of searches across jurisdictions tied to ICE or immigration keywords. Flock’s response was twofold: in August 2025 the company said it would stop pilot projects with federal agencies, and in January 2026 it shipped an administrative toggle that lets any law-enforcement customer disable federal sharing entirely. The company’s stated policy is that ICE cannot directly access Flock data; any access must be granted by a local customer and comply with applicable law.
The third is rhetoric. Langley has been unusually direct with critics, and that bluntness has itself become part of the story.
To CNN, addressing privacy concerns after the Brown case, he said: “If people are worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times. If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.” To Forbes, on the broader public reaction: “The consequence of building a product that actually changes people’s lives is that there will be a lot of people we piss off along the way, because what we’re doing actually matters.”
He has also drawn fire for sharper language — calling the activist group Deflock a “terroristic organization” and likening it to Antifa in subsequent commentary — which the ACLU and others have used as evidence that the company conflates principled opposition with extremism. In a more measured framing on World of DaaS in November 2025, Langley described the existing state of law enforcement data as “messy and old,” and laid out his theory of the case this way: “My whole philosophy as the CEO of Flock is: no one elected me president, no one elected me to be police chief of America. It’s my job to build the tools and give the guardrails for how to implement them in different cities.”
Readers can weigh those positions for themselves. What is not in dispute is the scale. Flock has built the de facto private surveillance backbone of American policing, and the policy fight over how it is governed will outlast any single news cycle.
State legislatures in 2026 are actively writing new ALPR rules. The company’s growth is happening alongside that policy work, not waiting for it.
“Flock Safety is the single most strategically important — and most strategically contested — company Atlanta has ever produced. You cannot understand the next decade of public-safety technology without understanding Garrett Langley’s company, and you cannot understand Atlanta’s place in the national tech conversation without understanding why this fight is happening here.”
— Eshan Ravuri, CEO, Angry Digital Inc. (publisher of ATL Rank)
What this means for Atlanta
Flock’s rise reframes what Atlanta tech is. The city’s earlier breakouts — Mailchimp, Calendly, SalesLoft, Pardot — were SaaS companies in well-understood categories. Flock is something different: a hard-tech-plus-software company, with manufacturing, with cameras and drones in the field, and with a regulatory surface area that touches every city council in the country.
That has two implications for Atlanta’s ecosystem. The first is talent: Flock’s headcount approaching 1,500, much of it Atlanta-based, is now one of the largest concentrations of hardware, ML, and government-software engineers in the Southeast. When (or if) it goes public, the second-order effects on the talent market will mirror what HubSpot did to Boston a decade ago.
The second is category dominance. Flock built the canonical answer to “public safety operating system” before competitors had a name for the category. Atlanta companies that intend to own a category in 2026 — whether they’re building in AI, fintech, climate, or defense — should treat that as the playbook.
Owning the search results, the AI-citation surface, and the press narrative for your category is now the competitive moat. See our AI Search Optimization guide for Atlanta businesses for the operational version of that argument.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Flock Safety?
Flock Safety was founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd, all three Georgia Tech alumni. Langley serves as CEO, Feury as CTO, and Todd as Chief People Officer. The company is headquartered in Atlanta and has raised approximately $1 billion in total funding.
Who is the CEO of Flock Safety?
Garrett Langley is the co-founder and CEO of Flock Safety. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009 and previously helped sell live-events platform Experience to Cox Enterprises for approximately $200 million in 2014. He has led Flock Safety since its founding in 2017.
What is Flock Safety’s valuation?
Flock Safety was valued at $8.4 billion in April 2026, established through the authorization of approximately $200 million in new shares at a per-share price about 6% above its March 2025 round. The valuation rose from $4.8 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in March 2025 to $8.4 billion in April 2026.
How much funding has Flock Safety raised?
Flock Safety has raised approximately $1 billion in total funding across eight rounds since 2017, including a $275 million Series F led by Andreessen Horowitz in March 2025 and an additional ~$200 million authorized via tender offer in April 2026. Lead investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Bedrock, Initialized Capital, Matrix Partners, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator.
Where is Flock Safety headquartered?
Flock Safety is headquartered at 1160 Howell Mill Road NW in Atlanta, Georgia, and is in the process of relocating its expanded headquarters to The Medici building in West Midtown Atlanta. As of May 2026 the company employs approximately 1,478 people, with the majority based in metro Atlanta.