Founded and backed by former Palantir executives, Peregrine Technologies hopes to hurry up local police departments’ access to surveillance data while curbing police misuse of their technologies.
By TThomas BrewsterForbes Employee
InMid-2021, Nick Noone sat in a San Francisco Bay Area courtroom as an authority witness in a murder trial. His company Peregrine’s software had linked cellphone locations, license plate data, historical police records and security camera footage to assist San Pablo Police Department investigators locate several suspects on the crime scene, and he presented the evidence.
The jury was convinced. Shortly thereafter, the defendants were sentenced to long prison terms. “Peregrine was really convincing in this particular case,” recalls San Pablo Police Chief Brian Bubar.
It was a triumph for the software, which Noone and co-founder Ben Rudolph developed after 18 months working for the San Pablo Police Department, where they worked on major cases with experienced detectives to find out how local police departments could higher use the information that they had to unravel crimes. They used that have to develop a sort of superpowered Google for police data. Enter a reputation or address into the web-based app, and Peregrine quickly searches court records, arrest reports, police interviews, transcripts of bodycam footage — every police record possible — for a match. It has made data stored in a variety of older, slower systems accessible in a straightforward, fast app that will be operated through an online browser.
“One of the reasons we have gained the trust of this community is because, although we are outsiders, we are not just sitting in the ivory towers of Silicon Valley.”
Without much promotion, word of Peregrine and its co-founders spread through law enforcement. Just a 12 months before the trial, Noone had left his senior job on the $20 billion government contractor Palantir, where he had spent years working with the U.S. military within the Middle East and used disparate intelligence data sets to discover ISIS members in Syria. Soon after, he had teamed up with Rudolph, a former U.N. refugee agency engineer, to form Peregrine. The idea was to offer the technology Palantir used to seek out ISIS members to local police, linking their various surveillance feeds and databases to enable faster, higher policing—the sort of transfer of military and intelligence technology to local police that always sets off alarm bells for civil rights activists.
Police chiefs were immediately impressed by the Peregrine co-founders’ approach of digging deep into police departments to know their needs. “One of the reasons we’ve gained the trust of this community is because, even though we’re outsiders, we’re not just sitting in the ivory towers of Silicon Valley,” said Noone, 35. Forbes during a two-hour interview in central London in May this 12 months. This attitude comes from his time within the Middle East, where he learned that as an alternative of “lecturing about the needs of the world,” engineers should work directly with those they serve.
“Nick is really a champion of his goals,” says Morgan Hitzig, who joined Peregrine shortly after coming back from Afghanistan, where she helped the Navy expel U.S. forces from the country in 2021. “He really wants to understand the problem that every law enforcement agency is trying to solve.” (Hitzig left the corporate earlier this 12 months to turn out to be an investor in Venrock.)
To date, Peregrine has signed 57 contracts with quite a lot of police and public safety agencies across the U.S., from Atlanta to LA. Revenue tripled from $3 million to $10 million in 2023. No one expects that to triple again to $30 million this 12 months, helped by $60 million in funding from Friends & Family Capital and Founders Fund (two of his old Palantir colleagues who at the moment are VCs, former CFO Colin Anderson and ex-engineer Trae Stephens, led separate funding rounds). With a valuation of $360 million after its last $30 million capital raise, Peregrine landed on Forbes“The next Billion Dollar Startups List for 2024 highlights 25 companies that we believe are likely to become unicorns.”
The rise of real-time surveillance
Under-resourced local police departments can rarely afford the sort of technology that larger agencies use. High-tech monitoring centers, known within the industry as “real-time crime centers,” or RTCCs, require expensive hardware and software and are subsequently the domain of huge agencies. But Peregrine’s technology makes RTCCs much more cost-effective for smaller agencies.
For Noone, the lower the price, the higher. “When I look at a million-dollar contract, I think that’s a little too much,” he said. “Our average contract value is $280,000 a year. If it were smaller, I’d be happy. We now have a customer who pays $32,000 a year, and that’s been a huge win.”
Not that well-resourced departments turn up their noses at Peregrine’s lower-cost offering. Over the past two months, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office has been ramping up its RTCC through a $900,000 contract with Peregrine. “With the advent of cloud-native applications, agencies large and small can deploy these modern stack technologies in a very short amount of time and with much lower costs and infrastructure,” said Dave Fontneau, CIO on the Orange County Sheriff’s Office ForbesAnd in late July, the Los Angeles Police Department, one among the most important police agencies within the country, signed a $2.8 million contract with Peregrine to support Project Blue Light, the agency’s effort to combat organized retail crime.
“This type of company … will inherently have a hard time protecting privacy.”
But the lower cost of RTCCs raises concerns amongst privacy advocates about indiscriminate surveillance. “We’re seeing a lot of police departments of all different sizes now getting access to Real Time Crime Centers, and it’s definitely enabling much more general access to surveillance feeds for some of these smaller departments that previously would have been too expensive for it,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “These types of companies … are inherently going to have a hard time protecting privacy because everything they’re built on is fundamentally privacy-damaging.”
Lipton has tracked the expansion of RTCCs within the EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance, which shows that there are at the very least 150 RTCCs in operation today. Lipton says the number is probably going higher; the variety of centres has grown so quickly that it’s difficult to maintain an accurate count. Both RTCCs and Peregrine technology can even enable “predictive policing”, long criticized for the unjustified discrimination against poorer, non-white neighborhoods, she added.
To address such concerns, Peregrine brought in Adam Klein, the previous chairman of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an agency tasked with ensuring that the NSA, FBI, CIA and DHS’s counterterrorism programs weren’t unconstitutional. As a consultant to the corporate, Klein explained to Peregrine employees find out how to avoid mistakes at these three-digit agencies and the way they designed the privacy and civil liberties “architecture” around their data collection. “If you don’t put these things in place from the beginning, it’s going to be very hard to put them in place later if something goes wrong,” Klein said. Forbes.
At Peregrine, this manifests itself in a continuously updated, detailed audit log and access controls for more sensitive data. To look up the situation of vehicles in license plate readers, for instance, users must enter a case number or provide a transparent reason. Facial recognition is just not allowed in any respect, after cases were reported where over-reliance on the technology led to wrongful arrests. To spot signs of abuse, Peregrine can even create charts of police behavior and keep track of officers’ use of force. In contracts, Peregrine includes a piece titled “Protecting Privacy and Civil Liberties,” where the corporate reminds cops that they’re the guardians of “sensitive data on behalf of the public.”
But Noone is not satisfied together with his technology being only a boon to police surveillance efforts. After Peregrine helped convict the 2 murder suspects, he thought, “This is definitely not a success. You look at them and think, These are two individuals. What the hell happened? Why are they here? How did they even get into this room? How do you break crime cycles?”
Noone hopes Peregrine will ultimately help police departments and other government agencies address the societal issues that lead people to interrupt the law. He also desires to make the toolkit available to other local agencies in order that they can examine city data to know why crime is going on in a specific place and at a specific time. “When do the kids get out of school? Are libraries open? What’s actually available in that afterschool program? Those are really interesting questions for a city to ask,” he said.
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