A marketplace for the badge
A business needs an off-duty police officer for Saturday night. The old way: call the department, leave a message, wait three to five days, and accept a coin-flip chance that nobody shows. Craig Peus runs the company that makes that same request resolve in about 90 seconds. He is the CEO of illuno, a Plano, Texas startup that turned one of the most analog corners of American labor - police moonlighting - into something you book from a phone.
illuno is, by its own description, the first purpose-built staffing marketplace for off-duty law enforcement. A business logs in, creates an event, and certified officers nearby get pinged in real time. They claim the shift. illuno handles the compliance, the liability insurance, and the payments. Departments, meanwhile, get a dashboard instead of a desk drawer full of sticky notes - they can see where their officers are moonlighting, for how long, and for how much. The officers booked are not private guards in lookalike uniforms. They are real, sworn police with arrest authority.
The numbers are the pitch. illuno reports fill rates in the 95-99% range against a national average that hovers somewhere between 40% and 50%. Turnaround drops from the better part of a week to roughly a day. In a sector where "we couldn't find anyone" is the default outcome, reliability is the entire product.
A blind email to Mark Cuban
illuno did not start in Plano, and it did not start with Peus. It started in Seattle in 2019, born from a firefighter's observation. Co-founder Luke Guthrie spent nearly two decades in fire service, where he kept overhearing police and sheriff's deputies trade notes on their second jobs. The more he looked, the more the moonlighting economy seemed held together with spreadsheets, phone trees, and goodwill. He launched a staffing agency in Washington state, then realized the real fix was software, not another middleman.
The technology had an unlikely pedigree. A colleague, David Bloom, brought Guthrie a cloud platform originally built to staff security for Seattle Seahawks games. Re-pointed at law enforcement, it became the bones of illuno. Co-founder Augustus Hellwich came aboard. Then came the move that startup lore is made of: the team cold-emailed Mark Cuban. He answered. "It just seemed obvious to me that there was a significant need in every major city, and I wanted to learn more," Cuban told the Dallas Observer. Mark Cuban Companies backed the company, and in 2021 illuno relocated from the Pacific Northwest to Plano, Texas.
Fill rate: illuno vs. the old way
From biology to barrels to badges
Peus is the variable that makes the story interesting. His resume reads like four different people stapled together. He studied Biological Sciences at Stanford, graduating in the mid-1990s - not business, not computer science. What followed was a career built on running things rather than specializing in one of them.
In the early 2000s he founded and ran Astera Care LLC, and for roughly seven years he was co-founder and managing partner of Blossom Street Capital Advisors. Then came a hard pivot into heavy industry: at Gravity Midstream, an oil-and-gas logistics company, he served first as Chief Financial Officer and then as President and CEO from 2016 to 2018. After that, agriculture technology - President and CEO of Tree3, Inc. through 2021. Energy, capital, agtech, and now public safety software. The common thread is not a sector. It is the chair: Peus is a sit-in-the-CEO-seat operator who keeps choosing industries that nobody would call glamorous and that everybody actually depends on.
That makes him an unusual fit for illuno, and arguably the right one. Police staffing is not a consumer app problem. It is a compliance problem, an insurance problem, a payments problem, and a trust problem, all wearing a tech-startup costume. Someone who has signed off on midstream energy contracts and run a capital advisory has spent a career in exactly those weeds.
The generalist's wager
There is a fashionable idea that founders should be domain obsessives who have lived a problem for a decade before touching it. Peus is the counterargument. His edge is range. A biology degree that never became a lab career. A capital advisory and a healthcare venture in the same years. Then energy, then agriculture, then public safety - each a regulated, capital-heavy, relationship-driven business that punishes amateurs. The pattern is not a man chasing trends. It is a man who keeps walking into rooms where the work is hard and the incumbents are complacent.
That is precisely the profile a company like illuno needs at the top. The hard parts of this business are not the app. They are the parts a career operator has stared at before: insurance underwriting, payment timing, regulatory compliance, and the slow art of earning trust from institutions that move at the speed of bureaucracy. A first-time founder might build a beautiful product and stall at the first municipal procurement meeting. Peus has sat across the table from that meeting in three industries already. The bet illuno is making is that experience in running unglamorous, regulated businesses transfers - that the skill of clearing a market is portable even when the market changes completely.
How a shift gets filled
Strip away the branding and illuno is a matching engine wrapped in a trust layer. A business posts an event with a time, a place, and a need. Officers in the area are notified instantly and matched by GPS location, so the system is offering shifts to the people most likely to actually take them. An officer claims the gig in a tap. Behind that single tap, the platform is quietly doing the unsexy work: verifying certification, attaching liability insurance, logging the assignment for the department, and queuing the payment so the officer is paid in a few days rather than waiting on a slow invoice cycle.
For departments, that logging is the quiet revolution. Moonlighting has always been a supervisory blind spot - hard to track, easy to abuse, and a genuine source of officer burnout when someone works a full shift and then three more across town. illuno gives commanders a live view of who is working where and for how long, which turns moonlighting from a liability they tolerate into an activity they can actually manage. The platform even tracks the rental cost of department assets like patrol vehicles, so a public resource used on a private job gets accounted for instead of absorbed.
It is a two-sided market with an unusually high bar on both sides. The supply is sworn officers, who cannot be onboarded like gig drivers. The demand is businesses and event organizers who need certainty, not a maybe. Most marketplaces compete on price; illuno competes on showing up. When the legacy alternative fills fewer than half of requests, simply being the option that reliably delivers a credentialed officer is a defensible moat.
The boring revolution
There is a national officer shortage, and there is a parallel reality: officers want supplemental income, and cities want events covered. The gap between those two facts is where families lose evenings and businesses lose security. illuno's argument is that the gap is a software problem nobody bothered to solve, because the customer - law enforcement - is the last industry a typical founder wants to build for.
The model is deliberately unglamorous. illuno is free for police departments; the hiring businesses pay transaction fees calculated as a percentage of hours worked. Officers get paid within days, not after a month of invoice limbo. The platform even handles asset recovery, so departments can recoup the cost of a patrol car used on a private gig. None of this is the stuff of keynote demos. All of it is the stuff that makes a marketplace actually clear.
Peus frames the mission in human terms more than technical ones: reduce the risk and liability for officers who choose to earn extra income outside their regular hours to support their families. The dashboard, the insurance layer, the GPS matching - they exist so a cop working a second job is covered, tracked, and paid, and so a department can prevent burnout instead of discovering it after the fact.
The ambition does not stop at police. illuno has signaled plans to extend the same machinery to fire and EMS staffing, and eventually beyond U.S. borders - the logic being that every public-safety agency in every major city has the same broken process and the same unmet demand. If Peus is right that the category is two decades behind, then the opportunity is not a clever feature. It is an entire labor market waiting to be digitized, one shift at a time.
For now, the company sits at the seed stage, having reported raising around $1.3 million, with the unusual advantage of a marquee backer who answered a stranger's email. Craig Peus did not invent the idea, and he will be the first to point at the founders who did. What he brings is the thing early companies most often lack and most desperately need: someone who has run the boring, hard, regulated business before, and is not scared of the next one.