March 13, 2025
The Safety Technology Ecosystem: Bedrock’s journey with Flock Safety
Today Flock Safety announced a $275 million fundraise at a $7.5 billion valuation. The fundraise includes significant participation from Bedrock alongside our friends at a16z, GreenOaks, Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, and others. Flock Safety's mission is to eliminate crime and create thriving communities. While Flock’s multiproduct safety technology ecosystem is already reaching over 5000 communities nationally, we believe they are truly still just getting started on their road to realizing their extraordinary mission.
Our partnership with Flock Safety is special. Geoff Lewis founded Bedrock six months after Garrett Langley founded Flock – and it was one of the first startups to surface on our narrative violations radar as potentially transcendent. Geoff had long viewed crime as a growing problem in the United States, and we believed that there was an opportunity to build a generational company by augmenting communities, law enforcement agencies, and private enterprises with breakthrough technology products that helped to solve and deter crime. After we failed to mobilize fast enough to be involved in Flock’s Series A fundraise, Geoff decided to hop on a plane to Atlanta with a singular mission: convince Garrett to raise more capital from Bedrock.
On Friday October 12, 2018, Geoff boarded a packed Delta flight to ATL and dashed straight from the airport to Flock’s original office, “The Clubhouse”. There, he spent hours with Garrett and his co-founder Matt, gaining a full appreciation for the scope of their mission and long term vision for the Company. Halfway through the meeting, Garrett said something that Geoff will never forget… what he said may perhaps be a story for another day many years from now. And as soon as Geoff heard these [redacted] words, he pivoted from being pitched on Flock to pitching Flock on raising more capital from Bedrock right away. It was a longshot; they really didn’t need the money. But we were persistent, and Flock ultimately agreed to raise a $10 million Series A-1 round led by Bedrock at a then ‘totally insane’ $60 million valuation; a near 3X valuation step-up to the Series A that had closed just a few months earlier.
Bedrock’s initial investment in 2018 was one of our first checks from our first fund; in this sense Garrett took a chance on us too. Geoff joined Flock’s board as an Observer – something he rarely does – but we knew even back then that this one was special. Today, Flock Safety is valued at 125X Bedrock’s entry valuation, and has grown from effectively pre revenue when we initially invested to over $300 million in ARR today. Along the way, we have invested over $164 million into the Company across multiple Bedrock funds and multiple Flock financing rounds.
In Bedrock’s view, there are three highly underappreciated aspects of Flock Safety’s business –
Waves of technological innovation have served the consumer market (e.g. social media), the enterprise market (e.g. SaaS), and the federal government (e.g. defense technology). Flock has set itself apart by pioneering a specific and proprietary playbook for engaging local, municipal, and state level government agencies and organizations. This innovative approach has enabled the Company to serve unique local market verticals that no other private technology company has accessed at scale. Making communities safer at the local level directly helps to enable families and individuals to thrive in their daily lives, leading to a more vibrant world for us all.
Criminals – just like normal citizens – do not know where cities start and stop. Yet historically, law enforcement agencies have faced a massive barrier: information sharing between jurisdictions because legacy systems are built and hosted on-premise with no cloud component. Flock’s systems are natively built in the cloud – and Flock has embraced an open ecosystem approach – so they have been able to knock down the barrier of inter-jurisdictional data sharing. As Flock products resolve more cases, local stakeholders across law enforcement, government, communities, and enterprises experience the ecosystem’s value first-hand, leading to a powerful multi-dimensional flywheel that continuously compounds.
Many of today’s most highly valued private technology companies have raised multiple billions of dollars in private financing to reach significantly lower ARR scale vs. Flock. In contrast, Flock has raised less than $1 billion in total private primary financing to reach its current extraordinary scale – despite having a significant hardware component (and hardware in general tends to be more capital intensive). Flock’s capital efficient approach minimizes dilution for team members and investors alike, helping to ensure the Company will be healthy and thriving for many decades to come.
At Bedrock, we could not be more honored to be one of Flock Safety’s earliest and largest capital partners.
Sending best vibes.