Meet Flock, the $8 billion startup backed by a16z and Tiger facing growing backlash against surveillance capitalism

On Dec.

13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing.

Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates.

But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since December 1st.

“We were able to find the vehicle on Flocks, actually get the actual plate, learn that it was a car rental,” said the Providence police chief.

Police tracked the car thanks to Flock and traced him to a storage unit in New Hampshire less than a week after the shooting.

Somewhere in Florida, at almost the same time, a different man was looking into Flock-collected data, but for an entirely different reason.

Officer Christopher Goodson wasn’t hunting a stranger, but was watching for his estranged wife.

Using his department’s access to Flock, he logged more than 700 unauthorized inquiries into her vehicle between Sept.

2024 and June 2026, and was arrested just last week.

Flock Safety has spent nine years promising to solve crime.

At the same time it may have built the most pervasive surveillance network in American history—one that is increasingly drawing loud pushback from advocates worried about what’s been collected, and who has access to the data.

Flock’s network of solar-powered cameras doesn’t just record license plates, they log the make, model, color and identifying details of every vehicle that passes in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states.

Then law enforcement offers can search that data using natural-language descriptions (for example car color or a bumper sticker) across thousands of jurisdictions simultaneously.