Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways and parking lots across the U.S.:
Growth has been explosive, with revenue up some 70% from the estimated $175 million it booked in 2023. It’s not yet profitable and has no imminent plan to be as it prioritizes growth, backed by a $275 million March funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Those numbers were more than sufficient to land Flock on Forbes’ 2025 Cloud 100 list of the top private cloud computing companies. Langley says turning Flock into a $100 billion business is “very within reach.” Ilya Sukhar, an early investor and partner at VC firm Matrix who sits on Flock’s board, agrees. “It’s a bit cliché, but it does feel like we’re just getting started,” he says. “It’s not hard for me to project to a place where we get to that level.”
Each Flock license plate reader cam costs between $3,000 and $3,500, with an additional fee for FlockOS, the operating system that makes all the data Flock collects accessible via a browser or a mobile app, based on either the number of users or cameras. Dunwoody PD, for instance, pays around $500,000 annually for its array of 105 cameras, gunshot detectors, that skittering DJI drone and the software that controls it all.
Flock’s growth isn’t solely fueled by its 5,000 law enforcement customers across 49 states (it hasn’t yet installed its cameras in Alaska). It has 1,000 corporate customers, including blue chips like FedEx, Lowe’s and Simon Property, America’s largest mall owner. Then there are housing and homeowner associations, small businesses, schools and organizations like the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, which has installed 64 Flock cameras across different properties in the city, including a community center that has reported a recent spike in antisemitic threats to Dunwoody police. All these customers can choose to grant the police access to their camera feeds, further expanding the surveillance coverage Flock can offer law enforcement. Many do.
Langley had no experience in police tech when he and fellow Georgia Tech alums Matt Feury, 36, and Paige Todd, 40, started the company in 2017. Previously they’d worked together on an app Langley cofounded for upgrading sports or concert seats to VIP-status events, where Feury and Todd were early employees. (It was acquired by Atlanta-based conglomerate Cox Enterprises and no longer exists.) Inspired by an unsolved robbery in Langley’s neighborhood, the trio started work on the first Flock prototype, an Android phone camera in a waterproof box that took pictures of cars and picked out license plates that could then be searched via an app.
Never lose sight of the fact that each and all of these parasitic scumsucking fucksticks have names and addresses.