Flock Safety's CEO Is Taking The Stage At Disrupt

Flock Safety founder and CEO Garrett Langley is heading to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to talk about surveillance, AI, and public safety. Given everything happening with the company right now, the timing makes this one of the more genuinely pointed conversations on the schedule.

Why this conversation actually matters right now

We covered exactly why this topic is so contentious just last week: LAPD, one of the largest police departments in the country, let its contract with Flock expire specifically over "serious concerns" about civil liberties and privacy. That wasn't an isolated decision either. Amazon's Ring ended its own partnership with Flock back in February, and the company has faced sustained pushback from privacy advocates including the ACLU, with some members of the public going as far as physically destroying Flock's surveillance cameras in protest.

A lot of that backlash traces back to Flock's continued work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement specifically, offering its camera networks and databases to the agency a detail that's clearly been a flashpoint for much of the criticism the company's faced.

So when Langley steps on stage at Disrupt, he's not walking into a friendly, uncontested conversation about a growing startup. He's walking into a moment where his company sits at the center of one of the most genuinely contested debates in tech right now: where exactly the line should sit between public safety and privacy in the AI era.

How Langley actually got here

Flock isn't Langley's first venture. Before founding the company, he worked on the car subscription service Clutch and the platform Experience, where he oversaw multiple teams including engineering and design, prior to Experience's sale to Cox Enterprises for $200 million back in 2014.

Flock itself started in 2017, with Langley co-founding the company alongside Matt Feury and Paige Todd. It went through Y Combinator before building significant traction selling surveillance technology to both businesses and law enforcement agencies. Most people associate Flock with license plate recognition specifically, but the company's technology footprint is broader than that; it also offers more general surveillance cameras, and has been actively developing drone-based first responder technology following its acquisition of Aerodome, a deal reportedly worth over $300 million for a company that was only 17 months old at the time.

The business has been genuinely booming, even amid the backlash

Whatever the privacy controversy, Flock's financial trajectory hasn't slowed down. Its most recent fundraise, a $275 million round last year, valued the company at $7.5 billion a sharp jump from the $4.8 billion valuation it held the prior year. In total, Flock has raised $950 million since its founding.

That's the genuinely striking tension sitting at the center of this whole story: Flock is simultaneously one of the fastest-growing, best-funded companies in its category, and one of the most publicly criticized surveillance companies operating in the US right now. Both things are true at the same time, and they're not really in conflict from a pure business standpoint; investor confidence and public backlash have been running on separate tracks.

Given everything happening around the company the LAPD contract lapsing, Ring's partnership ending, the ACLU's continued criticism, people physically destroying Flock cameras in the streets this Disrupt session isn't likely to be a soft, promotional conversation. TechCrunch's own framing makes that clear, describing it as certain to prove "illuminating to Flock's supporters and its critics" alike, which suggests real, substantive questions rather than a friendly fireside chat.

This is a genuinely useful opportunity to hear directly from the person running one of the most consequential and controversial companies in the AI-surveillance space, at a moment when major institutional partners are actively walking away from the company over the exact concerns Langley will presumably be asked to address head-on.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 runs October 13-15 at San Francisco's Moscone Center, and Langley's session is just one part of a broader lineup that's still being announced. The event typically draws around 10,000 founders, investors, and tech industry attendees for a mix of talks, workshops, and networking. Early ticket pricing is available now, ahead of what's expected to be the lowest pricing available for the rest of the year.

Surveillance technology, AI, and law enforcement partnerships have become one of the more genuinely fraught intersections in tech right now not an abstract policy debate, but one playing out in real contracts getting cancelled, real cameras getting torn down, and real institutional partners publicly distancing themselves from a company over specific, named concerns. Getting Flock's own CEO on stage to directly address that tension, rather than issuing a press statement or dodging the topic entirely, is a genuinely notable get for a conference and it's the kind of conversation that's going to matter regardless of which side of the surveillance debate you land on.