Flock Safety's founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, is scheduled to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, a major technology conference running October 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone Center. He will address AI, surveillance, and the future of public safety. His session is described on the conference agenda as a conversation about "privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult tradeoffs" — and it comes at a moment when his company faces growing opposition (TechCrunch).

Flock Safety, based in Atlanta, was founded in 2017 by Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. It went through Y Combinator, a well-known program that helps early-stage startups grow. The company sells surveillance technology to businesses and police departments. Its best-known product is license plate recognition — cameras that automatically read and record the plates on passing vehicles. Flock also sells general surveillance cameras. More recently, the company started developing drones that could be sent to an incident scene before officers arrive, following its purchase of a drone startup called Aerodome for over $300 million in October 2024 (TechCrunch).

The company's financial growth has been steep. Flock raised $275 million in 2025, reaching a valuation of $7.5 billion — up from $4.8 billion the year before. In total, the company has raised $950 million since it was founded (TechCrunch).

That financial growth, however, has been matched by growing challenges around public trust. Privacy advocates including the ACLU have pushed back against the company's expanding reach. Some people have gone further and physically destroyed Flock cameras. Flock also provides its cameras and databases to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a relationship that has drawn particular scrutiny (TechCrunch).

Two major contract losses in 2026 have raised the stakes. Amazon's Ring ended its partnership with Flock in February 2026. Then, in July 2026, the Los Angeles Police Department let its contract with Flock expire, citing serious concerns about civil liberties and privacy (TechCrunch) (TechCrunch).

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

The Disrupt appearance gives Langley a chance to make his case directly to the technology industry at a moment when that case is getting harder to make. The LAPD decision is especially significant: when one of the largest police departments in the country walks away from your product and specifically cites civil liberties, the response matters. Langley will likely need to address not just what Flock's technology does, but the rules and safeguards around it — how long data is kept, who can access it, and what oversight exists.

This is a tension that has come up before with surveillance technology. The technical capabilities — cameras that read license plates, drones that respond in real time, AI that detects objects — are well understood and increasingly common. The harder questions are about policy: who gets access to the data, how long it is stored, what oversight exists, and what say communities have when the technology spreads beyond their comfort level. Flock's relationship with ICE falls squarely in that contested area, as does the ACLU's ongoing opposition.

The losses of both the Ring partnership and the LAPD contract also point to a business challenge worth watching. Flock's growth has been driven mainly by police and city government contracts, with private-sector deals like the Ring partnership on top. Losing a major consumer-tech partner and a flagship police department customer in the same year makes it harder to argue that widespread adoption is inevitable. The $7.5 billion valuation reflects investor confidence in the company's continued growth; whether that confidence holds may depend on whether Langley can clearly explain how he plans to handle the tradeoffs he is scheduled to discuss.

For the technology professionals and investors attending Disrupt, the session will likely serve as a real-time test of how a company handles the gap between building powerful tools and keeping the public's trust to use them. Langley's engineering background and previous business successes give him credibility as a builder. The question the audience will want answered is whether that technical expertise extends to the policy problems now shaping Flock's future.

The broader pattern here is one the technology industry has been through before. New capabilities arrive faster than society can agree on how to use them, deployment moves faster than regulation, and the companies that succeed long-term are often the ones that take the friction seriously rather than brushing it aside. Whether Flock turns out to be one of those companies is an open question, and Langley's October session may offer the first clear signal of how he plans to answer it.