Who owns Flock Safety? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Flock Safety has become one of the most widely deployed, and most contested, surveillance companies in the United States. Founded in Atlanta in 2017, it sells automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras and a software platform that lets police departments and neighborhood associations track vehicles by plate, make, model, and color. The company says its network spans more than 5,000 communities across 49 states and includes over 100,000 cameras that log billions of vehicle scans.

That reach has made Flock a fast-growing business and a lightning rod. The same cameras that help solve car thefts and Amber Alerts have been used to run immigration searches for federal agents, to track a Texas woman in an abortion-related investigation, and, through misreads, to trigger wrongful stops at gunpoint. Dozens of cities have canceled contracts, and the American Civil Liberties Union has built a national campaign against the company.

Understanding who owns Flock Safety matters because the company is building privately held surveillance infrastructure that touches millions of drivers who never agreed to be tracked. Ownership determines whose commercial incentives shape how that data is collected, retained, and shared.

Flock Safety, legally Flock Group Inc., was founded in 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia by three Georgia Tech graduates: Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. Langley, an electrical engineer by training, has served as CEO since the start. The idea began close to home: Langley wanted to help his own neighborhood solve a string of break-ins, and the first product was a solar-powered camera that captured license plates and fed them into a searchable database.

The company has since expanded well beyond plate readers. Its platform now includes gunshot-detection sensors, video surveillance, drone-as-first-responder programs, and investigative software that stitches these feeds together for law enforcement. Flock sells on a subscription model, charging roughly $2,500 per camera per year rather than selling hardware outright, which gives it recurring, software-like revenue.

Flock's most recent confirmed valuation is approximately $8.4 billion, set in April 2026 through a secondary share authorization at a per-share price about 6% above its 2025 round. With no public market quote, valuing a private company like Flock rests on discounted cash flow estimates of its future subscription revenue. The company has said it surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, up from roughly $285 million at the end of 2024, reflecting growth of about 70% year over year during that stretch.

Flock Safety has no public stock. Its shares do not trade on any exchange, and no IPO has been announced. The company has funded its growth through venture capital and, more recently, secondary transactions that give employees and early investors partial liquidity without a public listing. Its scale and revenue base make it a frequent subject of IPO speculation, but management has not committed to a timeline.

Flock has not publicly disclosed the equity stakes held by its three co-founders. As founder and CEO, Garrett Langley is widely reported to hold the largest individual founder stake, though the exact percentage is not confirmed. After more than eight funding rounds, founder ownership has been diluted by successive venture raises, which is typical for a company at this stage.

Matt Feury and Paige Todd co-founded the company and have held senior operating roles, with Todd leading people and culture functions. Their individual stakes have not been disclosed. Flock has not reported any dual-class share structure or founder-protective voting provisions.

Flock raised capital steadily as it expanded from a single neighborhood product into a national law enforcement platform, with valuations accelerating sharply in its later rounds:

Note: Flock graduated from Y Combinator in 2017 and raised an early Series B that is inconsistently reported across sources. Cumulative disclosed funding stood above $380 million after the Series E and exceeds $650 million after the Series F. Some trackers cite higher totals that include secondary transactions.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is Flock's most influential backer. It led the $150 million Series D in 2021 and returned to lead the $275 million Series F in 2025, making it a repeat lead across the company's most important rounds. a16z has been an active investor in public safety and defense technology, a thesis that also underpins its stake in Anduril, whose ownership structure shows a similar pattern of venture capital flowing into government-facing hardware and software.

Bedrock has participated across multiple rounds and is often cited as a co-lead in the 2025 Series F. Meritech Capital led the Series C in 2020 and has remained an investor. Matrix Partners backed Flock from its earliest days, leading the Series A. Tiger Global led the $150 million Series E in 2022 at the $3.5 billion valuation, joined by Spark Capital and Alexis Ohanian's firm 776.

Later rounds broadened the base further, drawing in Greenoaks Capital, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Initialized Capital. This roster overlaps heavily with the investors behind other surveillance and defense startups, including Founders Fund's position in Shield AI.

Flock has not announced IPO plans. With more than $650 million raised privately and an $8.4 billion valuation already established, the company faces no near-term financing pressure that would force a public offering. Its 2026 secondary share sale suggests a preference for delivering liquidity to employees and early investors while staying private. An IPO remains plausible once its revenue base and regulatory position stabilize, but nothing has been filed.

Garrett Langley has led Flock Safety as CEO since founding it in 2017. He is the company's chief strategist, product visionary, and public defender, appearing at conferences and in the media to argue that Flock can meaningfully reduce crime. As founder and CEO, he holds both operational authority and the largest reported founder equity stake, giving him substantial control over the company's direction. In 2026, as controversy mounted, Langley personally announced new safeguards, including mandatory audit systems and a shorter data-retention window.

Matt Feury and Paige Todd co-founded Flock alongside Langley. Feury has focused on product and engineering functions, and Todd has led people and organizational functions. Both remain associated with the company, though Langley is the dominant public and strategic figure.

Flock has not published a full board roster. Its lead investors, particularly Andreessen Horowitz and Meritech Capital, hold board representation consistent with their roles across multiple financing rounds. As is standard for a venture-backed company, board control is shared between founders and major institutional investors, with the largest backers holding the most influence over governance decisions.

Flock's most damaging controversy involves federal access to local camera data. Reporting in 2025 and 2026 showed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gained indirect access to Flock's network through local and state police customers, even though ICE was not itself a Flock customer. Audit records from the Denver Police Department showed Flock data was queried in more than 1,400 immigration-related searches over roughly a year. A class action filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 alleged federal agencies queried that city's cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months. Flock has maintained that customers own and control their data, but the cross-agency search capability undercut that claim.

The ACLU has become Flock's most organized opponent, launching a national "Get the Flock Out" campaign in 2026 and accusing the company of building a nationwide surveillance network and of misleading city councils and police departments about how its cameras are used. Civil liberties groups argue that persistent, warrantless tracking of ordinary drivers amounts to mass surveillance, and that the aggregation of plate scans across thousands of jurisdictions creates a searchable map of Americans' movements.

Flock's cameras have contributed to wrongful police stops when plates were misread or flagged in error. Documented cases include a Black family with children held at gunpoint in Aurora, Colorado after an ALPR error. These incidents highlight how automated flags, when trusted without verification, can escalate quickly into dangerous encounters, and they have featured prominently in the case against expanding the technology.

Community pushback has translated into lost business. More than 50 localities ended or suspended Flock contracts in a single year, with cities including Evanston and Oak Park deactivating cameras and Woodburn, Oregon shutting its system off amid immigration-enforcement concerns. In response, Flock announced in 2026 that it would make previously optional safeguards mandatory for law enforcement customers and shorten its default data-retention period from 30 days to seven. The pattern of lawsuits, contract losses, and misreads maps the kind of exposures a formal risk register is built to track.

Flock Safety's ownership structure sits at the center of a debate about who should control surveillance infrastructure in a democracy. Because the company is privately held and venture-backed, it answers primarily to investors who expect rapid growth, not to voters or a public board.

That growth imperative shapes the product. Investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global funded Flock on the expectation that it would expand its camera footprint and its government customer base aggressively, which is exactly the expansion that has drawn civil liberties objections. The same commercial logic that makes Flock attractive to venture capital, recurring subscription revenue tied to an ever-larger surveillance network, is what critics say makes it hard for the company to voluntarily limit its own reach.

Concentration of control also matters. As founder, CEO, and largest founder shareholder, Garrett Langley holds significant authority over how Flock responds to controversy, from data-retention policy to whether federal agencies can search local feeds. When he announced new safeguards in 2026, that was a decision made inside a private company, not one imposed by regulators or shareholders through public governance.

For the cities, police departments, and residents affected by Flock's cameras, ownership determines accountability. A publicly traded company faces disclosure requirements and shareholder scrutiny; a private, venture-backed one does not. That gap between Flock's societal footprint and its private accountability is the core reason its ownership structure deserves attention. It mirrors the questions raised by other privately backed surveillance and data companies, including how Palantir makes money from government contracts and who owns Ring, the neighborhood camera network now inside Amazon.

Garrett Langley is the CEO and co-founder of Flock Safety. He has led the company since founding it in Atlanta in 2017 and is its most visible public figure. He holds both operational authority and the largest reported founder equity stake.

No. Flock Safety is a privately held company with no public stock listing. No IPO has been announced. It has funded its growth through venture capital and secondary share sales, most recently a transaction in April 2026 that valued the company at roughly $8.4 billion.

Flock Safety was co-founded in 2017 by three Georgia Tech alumni: Garrett Langley (CEO), Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. The company began as a solar-powered license-plate camera designed to help Langley's own Atlanta neighborhood deter break-ins.

Exact ownership percentages are not publicly disclosed. Garrett Langley is the largest reported individual founder shareholder. Major institutional investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Bedrock, Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, and Tiger Global, with later participation from Greenoaks Capital, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, and Kleiner Perkins.

Flock has raised more than $650 million in disclosed primary funding across its rounds. Its valuation rose from about $3.5 billion at the 2022 Series E to $7.5 billion at the March 2025 Series F, then to roughly $8.4 billion in an April 2026 secondary sale.

Flock says it does not sell data directly to ICE and that customers own their data. However, reporting in 2025 and 2026 showed that federal agencies, including ICE, gained indirect access through local and state police customers who ran searches on their behalf, prompting lawsuits and dozens of contract cancellations.