Follow the Money: The Business Behind the Cameras on Your Street

Start with the thing most people get wrong: the automated license plate readers going up on your street usually aren’t bought and owned by your police department. They’re rented, month to month, from private companies — and the biggest of them is now one of the most valuable startups in America. Understanding this as a business explains a lot about why the cameras keep multiplying.

The $8.4 billion startup

Flock Safety, founded in 2017, has been valued at roughly $8.4 billion as of April 2026 — a figure that, as one writer put it, now tops the market value of ADT, the household-name home-security company. Its valuation climbed fast: $3.5 billion in early 2022, to $7.5 billion in March 2025 (a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz), to $8.4 billion a year later. (TechCrunch · Tech Startups.) It has raised on the order of $1 billion from investors including a16z, Tiger Global, Founders Fund, Meritech, Kleiner Perkins, and — tellingly — the body-camera maker Axon.

Flock is private, so it publishes no audited financials. It has put exactly one revenue figure on the record: a spokesperson told TechCrunch the company crossed “$300 million in annual recurring revenue” in 2024, growing 70% year over year. (Any other revenue number you see is a third-party estimate, not a disclosure.) Whatever the precise figure, the direction is clear: this is a fast-growing, richly funded company whose product is watching where you drive.

The tell: the only public pure-play loses money

Here’s the detail that says the most about this industry. The one company that is both publicly traded and a pure-play ALPR vendor — Rekor Systems (NASDAQ: REKR) — loses money hand over fist. Its revenue has grown (about $48 million in 2025, up from $20 million in 2022), but it posted a $31 million net loss in 2025 and a $61 million loss in 2024, carried a “going concern” warning in its annual report, and trades under a dollar a share. (SEC 10-K.)

The other giant in the space, Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI), owns the Vigilant Solutions ALPR business it bought for about $445 million in 2019. But Motorola is an $11.7 billion-a-year conglomerate (FY2025), and it does not break out ALPR revenue at all — the entire product line is buried, undisclosed, inside a company that also sells police radios and body cameras. (MSI results.)

The takeaway: the money in ALPR is real, but it’s concentrated in a private, venture-funded rocket (Flock) and a hidden slice of a defense-scale conglomerate (Motorola). The one company forced to open its books shows a business that doesn’t yet pay for itself — which tells you the bet is on scale: more cameras, more agencies, more searches, later.

How fast it grew

The growth is the story. Flock went from about 1,000 law-enforcement agencies in 2022 to more than 5,000 in 2025; from tens of thousands of cameras to 80,000+ by September 2025 and 100,000+ by June 2026; and from roughly 1 billion vehicle scans a month in 2024 to about 20 billion a month in 2025. (Forbes · NBC News.) Analysts peg the overall ALPR market at roughly $3–4.5 billion today, growing about 7–11% a year toward $5–9 billion by the early 2030s — though those are analyst estimates with wide, scope-driven variance, so treat the range, not any single number, as the signal. (Grand View Research, among others.)

Buying Washington

A company growing this fast eventually shows up in the capital. Federal lobbying is disclosed by law, so here the numbers are hard. Flock spent nothing on federal lobbying until late 2024 — then $90,000 in the last quarter of 2024 and about $690,000 in just the first three quarters of 2025, all through outside firms (Mercury Public Affairs, BGR Government Affairs), coded to homeland-security and law-enforcement issues and the 2026 appropriations bill. (OpenSecrets.) Motorola Solutions, a Washington veteran, spent about $2 million on federal lobbying in 2024. (OpenSecrets.)

The spending hasn’t bought quiet. After reporting that police were running Flock searches on behalf of ICE and that a Texas officer searched the network nationwide for a woman suspected of an abortion, Congress opened a formal investigation into Flock in August 2025. (404 Media.) In California, two state legislators returned Flock’s campaign donations over its ICE cooperation and privacy record. (CalMatters/Politico.)

What about North Carolina? An honest answer.

You asked the fair question: how much have these companies spent lobbying or advertising here? We went looking — and the honest answer is a null result, which is itself revealing. We text-searched the complete North Carolina Secretary of State lobbying directory (July 2025). Flock Safety, Rekor, and Genetec are not registered to lobby in North Carolina at all. The only ALPR vendor registered is Motorola Solutions — through a contract firm, MultiState Associates — and generically for the whole company, not for ALPR. There is no reliable North Carolina lobbying-spend or advertising figure for any of these vendors, and we won’t invent one.

Sit with why that is. Flock doesn’t need to lobby Raleigh. North Carolina law already permits warrantless ALPR searches, so there’s no bill it has to buy. The company’s money flows through procurement and direct sales — a contract signed by a sheriff or a city manager, one agency at a time, out of a budget the public rarely votes on. In a state that already lets the cameras operate without a warrant, the surveillance expands not through the statehouse but through the purchase order. That’s quieter than a lobbying scandal, and harder to see — which is exactly why it works.

Why the money matters

Follow the money and the incentive comes into focus. A private company valued at $8.4 billion on the promise of growth has one job: put up more cameras, sign more agencies, and run more searches. Its investors are betting that the surveillance network keeps expanding. “Is this good for the community?” is not the question the business model asks. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s just what a venture-backed company is for. Which is why the decision about whether these cameras belong on our roads can’t be left to the vendor, or to the sales cycle. It belongs to the public that pays for them. (What New Hanover County pays · the statewide picture.)

Sources & a note on rigor

• Flock valuation/funding/revenue: TechCrunch (2025, $7.5B + $300M ARR) · Tech Startups ($8.4B, 2026).
• Rekor Systems: SEC Form 10-K · FY2025 results.
• Motorola Solutions: FY2025 financial results.
• Federal lobbying: OpenSecrets — Flock · OpenSecrets — Motorola (both aggregate U.S. Senate LDA filings).
• Oversight & politics: 404 Media (congressional investigation).
• North Carolina: NC Secretary of State lobbying directory, July 2025 (searched in full).
• Market size: Grand View Research and other analysts (estimates).

Financial figures are drawn from SEC filings, company statements, and federal lobbying disclosures; where a company is private (Flock, Genetec) no audited figures exist and any revenue number is a third-party estimate, labeled as such. Market-size figures are analyst projections with wide variance. The North Carolina lobbying finding is a documented null result from the state’s own directory, not an inference. General information for public discussion, not legal or financial advice. “Flock” here means Flock or any comparable ALPR vendor. Last updated June 30, 2026.