Founded and backed by former Palantir execs, Peregrine Technologies hopes to turbocharge local police department access to surveillance data, while curbing cops’ abuses of their technologies.
By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff
Inmid-2021, Nick Noone was on the stand in a Bay Area courtroom, serving as an expert witness in a murder trial. His company Peregrine’s software had connected mobile locations, license plate data, historical police records and surveillance camera footage to help San Pablo Police Department investigators place multiple suspects at the site where it occurred, and he was laying out the evidence.
The jury found it convincing. Soon after, the defendants were given lengthy prison sentences. “Peregrine was really powerful for the prosecution of that specific case,” recalled San Pablo PD chief Brian Bubar.
It was a triumph for the software, which Noone and cofounder Ben Rudolph had built after embedding for 18 months with the San Pablo PD. There, they worked major cases alongside seasoned detectives to learn how local police departments could better use the data at their disposal to solve crimes. They used that experience to inform the development of what is essentially a super-powered Google for police data. Enter a name or address into its web-based app, and Peregrine quickly scans court records, arrest reports, police interviews, body cam footage transcripts — any police dataset imaginable — for a match. It’s taken data siloed across an array of older, slower systems, and made it accessible in a simple, speedy app that can be operated from a web browser.
“One of the reasons we have won the trust of this community is because, though we’re outsiders, we don’t just sit in the ivory towers of Silicon Valley.”
With little marketing, word spread within law enforcement about Peregrine and its cofounders. Just a year before the trial, Noone had quit an exec job at $20 billion government contractor Palantir, where he’d spent years in the Middle East working with the U.S. military, using disparate intelligence datasets to help identify ISIS members in Syria. Soon after, he’d teamed up with Rudolph, a former technologist with the U.N. Refugee Agency, to build Peregrine with the idea of bringing the tech Palantir used to find ISIS members to local police, stitching together their various surveillance feeds and databases for faster, better policing – the kind of transfer of military-intelligence tech to local cops that often raises red flags for civil rights activists.
Police chiefs were immediately impressed by the Peregrine cofounders’ approach of going deep inside police departments to understand their needs. “One of the reasons we have won the trust of this community is because, though we’re outsiders, we don’t just sit in the ivory towers of Silicon Valley,” Noone, 35, told Forbes during a two-hour interview in central London this May. That mindset came from his time in the Middle East, where he learned that rather than “pontificating on what the world needs,” technologists should be working directly with those they’re serving.
“Nick really walks the walk,” said Morgan Hitzig, who joined Peregrine soon after returning from Afghanistan where she’d helped the Navy get U.S. forces out of the country in 2021. “He deeply wants to understand the problem that every law enforcement agency is solving.” (Hitzig left the company earlier this year to become an investor with Venrock.)
To date, Peregrine has scored 57 contracts across a wide range of police and public safety agencies in the U.S., from Atlanta to L.A. Revenue tripled in 2023, from $3 million to $10 million. Noone expects that to triple again to $30 million this year, bolstered by $60 million in funding from the likes of Friends & Family Capital and Founders Fund (two of his old Palantir colleagues who are now VCs, former CFO Colin Anderson and ex-engineer Trae Stephens, led separate funding rounds). Valued at $360 million after its latest raise of $30 million, Peregrine landed a spot on Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startup list for 2024, which highlights 25 companies we think are likely to become unicorns.
The Rise Of Real-Time Surveillance
Underserved local police departments rarely can afford the kind of technology that larger agencies employ. High-tech surveillance hubs, known in the industry as “Real-Time Crime Centers” or RTCCs, require expensive hardware and software, making them the domain of major departments. But Peregrine’s tech makes RTCCs much more accessible to smaller agencies.
For Noone, the lower the cost, the better. “When I look at a million dollar contract, I’m like, that’s a little too big,” he said. “Our average contract value is $280,000 a year. If it were smaller, I’d be happy. We have a customer that pays $32,000 a year now and it was a huge win.”
Not that well-resourced departments are turning their noses up at Peregrine’s less costly offering. In the last two months, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office spun 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 order and with much less cost and infrastructure,” Dave Fontneau, CIO at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, told Forbes. And in late July, the Los Angeles Police Department, one of the country’s largest PDs, signed a $2.8 million deal with Peregrine to support “Project Blue Light,” the agency’s effort to fight organized retail crime.
“These types of companies… are inherently going to have a hard time protecting privacy.”
But the lower cost of RTCCs has privacy advocates concerned about indiscriminate surveillance. “We see a lot of police departments of a lot of different sizes getting access to Real Time Crime Centers now, and it’s definitely facilitating a lot more general access to surveillance feeds for some of these smaller departments that would have previously found it cost prohibitive,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “These types of companies… are inherently going to have a hard time protecting privacy, because everything that they’re built on is basically privacy damaging.”
Lipton has been tracking the growth of RTCCs in the EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance, which shows there are at least 150 RTCCs in operation today. Lipton says the number is likely higher; the number of centers has grown so fast that it’s been challenging to keep an accurate count. Both RTCCs and the Peregrine technology can also enable “predictive policing,” long criticized for unfairly targeting poorer, non-white neighborhoods, she added.
To allay such concerns, Peregrine brought on Adam Klein, former chairman of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an agency that sought to ensure counterterrorism programs at the NSA, FBI, CIA and DHS weren’t unconstitutional. As an advisor to the company, Klein walked Peregrine staff through how to avoid mistakes made at those three-letter agencies, as well as how they designed privacy and civil liberties “architecture” around their data collection. “If you don’t put those things in from the start, it’s going to be really hard to get them in there later when something goes wrong,” Klein told Forbes.
In Peregrine, that’s manifested in a constantly updated, granular audit log and access controls for more sensitive data. For instance, to look up car locations in license plate readers, users must enter a case number or provide a clear reason. Facial recognition isn’t allowed at all, after cases in which over-reliance on the technology led to wrongful arrests. To monitor for signs of abuse, Peregrine can also draw up graphs on police behavior and keep tabs on officers’ use of force. In contracts, Peregrine includes a section titled “Protection of Privacy and Civil Liberties,” in which the company reminds cops they are the guardians of “sensitive data on behalf of the public.”
But Noone isn’t content with his technology just being a boon for cops’ surveillance efforts. After Peregrine helped to convict the two murder suspects, he recalled thinking, “That’s definitely not a win. You look at them, and you’re like, these are two individuals. What the heck happened? Why are they here? How did they get into this room in the first place? How do you disrupt cycles of crime?”
Noone’s hope is that Peregrine will ultimately help police departments and other government agencies take on the societal problems that lead to people breaking the law. He wants to open up the toolset to other local agencies, so they can probe urban data to understand why crime is occurring in a given place and time. “When did the juveniles get off of school? Are there libraries that are open? What’s actually available in that afterschool program? There are really interesting questions that a city can ask of itself,” he said.