Flock Safety founder and CEO Garrett Langley is scheduled to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where he will address AI, surveillance, and the future of public safety. The conference runs October 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Langley's session, described on the Disrupt agenda as a conversation about "privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult tradeoffs," places him on stage amid an intensifying public debate over his company's core products (TechCrunch).

Atlanta-based Flock Safety was founded in 2017 by Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd, and went through Y Combinator. The company sells surveillance technology to businesses and law enforcement agencies, with license plate recognition as its signature offering alongside general surveillance cameras. More recently, Flock has been developing drone first responder capabilities following its acquisition of Aerodome, a drone startup it purchased for over $300 million in October 2024 (TechCrunch).

The company's financial trajectory has been steep. Flock raised a $275 million round in 2025 at a $7.5 billion valuation, up from a prior-year valuation of $4.8 billion. Total funding since inception stands at $950 million (TechCrunch).

That capital growth, however, runs parallel to a mounting set of challenges on the adoption and public trust fronts. Privacy advocates including the ACLU have pushed back against the company's expanding footprint. Some members of the public have gone further, physically destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Flock also offers its cameras and databases to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a relationship that has drawn particular scrutiny (TechCrunch).

Two high-profile contract losses in 2026 have sharpened the stakes. Amazon's Ring ended its partnership with Flock Safety in February 2026. Months later, the LAPD let its contract with Flock expire in July 2026, citing serious concerns over civil liberties and privacy (TechCrunch) (TechCrunch).

Langley is no stranger to defending his company's vision in public forums. He spoke at TED2026 about the role of technology in data-driven policing and integrated policing technology (Police1). Before founding Flock, Langley worked on the car subscription service Clutch and oversaw engineering and design teams at the platform Experience, which was sold to Cox Enterprises for $200 million in 2014 (TechCrunch).

The Disrupt stage appearance gives Langley a venue to make his case directly to the technology industry at a moment when the ground beneath that case is shifting. The LAPD decision is particularly consequential: when one of the largest police departments in the United States walks away from your product explicitly citing civil liberties, the rebuttal matters. Langley's session will presumably need to address not just what Flock's technology does, but the governance frameworks, data retention policies, and accountability structures that determine whether institutional buyers can defend their use of it.

This is a familiar tension in the deployment of surveillance infrastructure. The technology capabilities, license plate recognition, drone-based real-time response, AI-assisted object detection, are well understood and increasingly commoditized. The contested ground is the policy layer: who gets access to the data, how long it is retained, what oversight exists, and what recourse communities have when deployment expands beyond their comfort. Flock's ICE relationship sits squarely in that contested zone, as does the ACLU's sustained opposition.

Ring's withdrawal and the LAPD contract expiration also point to a commercial dynamic worth watching. Flock's growth has been driven largely by law enforcement and municipal contracts, with private-sector partnerships like the Ring deal layered on top. Losing both a major consumer-tech partner and a flagship police department customer in the same year compresses the runway for the narrative that adoption is inevitable. The $7.5 billion valuation reflects investor confidence in that trajectory; whether that confidence holds may depend on whether Langley can articulate a framework for the tradeoffs the Disrupt agenda promises he will discuss.

For the technology professionals and investors who make up Disrupt's audience, the session is likely to serve as a real-time test of how a company navigates the gap between building powerful infrastructure and maintaining the social license to deploy it. Langley's engineering background and prior exits give him credibility on the build side. The question the Disrupt audience will want answered is whether that technical fluency extends to the governance problems now determining Flock's commercial trajectory.

The broader arc here is one the industry has navigated before across multiple technology shifts. Capability outpaces consensus, deployment outpaces regulation, and the companies that eventually dominate are often the ones that engage seriously with the friction rather than dismissing it. Whether Flock falls into that category is an open question, and Langley's October session may offer the first structured signal of how he intends to answer it.