The Engineer Who Keeps Going Where It's Hard
Ben Rudolph graduated from Stanford in 2013 with a computer science degree and a gymnastics scholarship behind him. He had job offers. He had options. He flew to Geneva instead.
That choice - trading a comfortable Silicon Valley seat for UNHCR's nascent innovation lab - tells you most of what you need to know about how Ben Rudolph operates. He is drawn not to problems that are well-resourced and well-staffed, but to problems where the gap between what technology can do and what institutions are actually doing is widest. Refugee camps. Police records systems. Government agencies drowning in disconnected data.
At Peregrine Technologies, the company he co-founded with college gymnastics teammate Nick Noone in 2018, Rudolph is the engineering engine behind a platform that now serves law enforcement agencies covering more than 80 million Americans. It consolidates body-camera footage, dispatch records, crime databases, license plate data, and dozens of other fragmented sources into a single, searchable, real-time system. In 2025, Sequoia Capital led a $190 million Series C round, valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
I get to make a difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world: refugees.
Ben Rudolph, on his work at UNHCR, 2013The interesting thing about Rudolph's path is how consistent it has been, beneath the surface variation. Geneva in 2013. San Pablo police station in 2018. Both required the same willingness to sit in uncomfortable places and understand what was actually broken before writing a single line of code.
From Rings Specialist to Refugee Tech
Naperville, Illinois is not a place associated with building $2.5 billion startups. But it produced Ben Rudolph - 5'5", son of a Michigan State gymnast, younger brother of a Wisconsin-Madison water polo captain, and a person who, as of 2009, had qualified for All-American honors on the gymnastics rings and competed in the Maccabia Games in Israel.
Stanford took him on scholarship. He studied computer science. He competed. He interned at Cisco (2010), SurveyMonkey (2011), and Ooyala (2012) - the standard-issue Silicon Valley progression. Then, in his senior year, a class changed everything.
The Class That Changed Course
"Rethinking Refugee Communities," co-taught by Tino Cuellar, introduced Rudolph to the mechanics of displacement and the technological vacuum inside humanitarian systems. By graduation, he had turned down local tech offers and accepted an internship at UNHCR's innovation lab in Geneva. It became a full-time role. He spent nearly two years conducting fieldwork across Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ecuador, and Thailand - and building RescueSMS, an SMS platform that helped intake officers track refugees' access to tents, food rations, and medical care in camps without reliable internet connectivity.
This is not the typical Silicon Valley founding story - the Stanford dropout who builds a dormitory app. Rudolph's path runs through East Africa and through spreadsheets so unwieldy that aid workers could barely navigate them. The engineering mindset he brought to UNHCR - understand the user first, then build - is identical to the methodology Peregrine used years later when Rudolph and Noone embedded themselves inside the San Pablo Police Department for 18 months before writing production code.
After UNHCR, Rudolph joined Dimagi as a Senior Software Engineer II. Dimagi builds CommCare, open-source mobile software used by frontline health workers in over 60 countries. Another stint at the edges of official systems. Another round of learning what large organizations actually do with data when nobody's watching.
The Police Station, the Teammate, the Platform
In 2009, Ben Rudolph and Nick Noone were competing on the same Stanford gymnastics rings squad. Both specialists. Both part of a team that went on to win NCAA championships. By 2018, Noone had spent five years at Palantir and Rudolph had spent years building humanitarian software on three continents. They founded Peregrine together.
Peregrine's origin is specific in a way that matters. Rather than building a platform and then finding customers, Rudolph and Noone moved into the San Pablo Police Department's investigations unit for 18 months. They worked alongside detectives. They saw, up close, how investigators in American law enforcement were pulling data from disconnected record management systems, body-cam archives, dispatch logs, and spreadsheets - often manually - to do work that should have been automated years ago.
What came out of those 18 months was a data fusion platform built around the actual workflows of law enforcement, not an abstracted idea of what law enforcement does. Peregrine integrates crime databases, body-worn camera systems, police location data, suspicious activity reports, license plate readers, and more - then makes the resulting data searchable, analyzable, and actionable in real time.
The growth has been steep. Revenue more than tripled in 2023 alone, growing from $3 million to $10 million. By August 2024, Peregrine held 57 active contracts with U.S. public safety agencies. By 2025, the platform covered agencies serving more than 80 million Americans. The Series C - $190 million led by Sequoia at a $2.5 billion valuation, closed in two weeks - confirmed what the customer numbers had been signaling for a while: Peregrine is becoming infrastructure.
Rudolph's specific engineering philosophy, articulated on his GitHub profile, is worth quoting: leave code better than you found it. Embrace technical challenges. Prioritize understanding before solutions. Build resilient teams. Value constructive feedback. These are not novel engineering principles. What's notable is that he actually lived them - first in refugee camps, then in a California police department, and now at a company scaling rapidly toward the center of American public safety.