"Uber for hiring off-duty cops" - post an event, an officer claims it in minutes.
The wordmark, lowercase and unhurried. A company that staffs police for a living picked a logo that whispers instead of shouts - which is either irony or good taste. Plano, Texas.
Here is a fact about American policing that sounds made up but isn't: a huge amount of it is freelance. An officer finishes a shift, changes out of nothing in particular, and goes to stand outside a concert, a construction site, a bar mitzvah, a Target on Black Friday. This is called off-duty work, it is a multi-billion-dollar shadow economy, and until recently it ran on clipboards, group texts, and the personal cell phone of one very tired sergeant. illuno's pitch is that this is insane, and that software can fix it.
The company, headquartered in Plano, Texas, runs a two-sided marketplace. On one side: businesses, event planners, schools, and houses of worship that need a certified officer for a few hours. On the other: thousands of off-duty officers who see requests land on a real-time dashboard and claim the ones they want. In between: illuno, quietly handling the parts nobody enjoys - compliance, jurisdiction rules, liability insurance, payroll, and reporting.
If that sounds like a gig-economy app, that is exactly the point. illuno describes its model as transactional rather than agency-based, "commonly seen with ride-share, home-share, and gig economy platforms." Co-developed with input from the Fraternal Order of Police, it is, in the company's own framing, an Uber-like layer between the people who want protection and the people licensed to provide it.
The results the company reports are the kind that make a marketplace investable. A 99% fill rate. An average turnaround of about 24 hours, against an industry status quo of three to five days that frequently can't fill the request at all. The trick to those numbers is liquidity: illuno pulls officers not just from the department in the city where the event is happening, but from surrounding departments whose officers are eligible to work that location. More supply, more fills. Marketplace 101, applied to a market that had somehow never gotten the memo.
And the money is arranged so that nobody has to lose. The taxpayer pays nothing - a business hires the officer directly. The officer earns extra income with the liability handled. The department, which pays nothing to participate, gets tools to track and even recoup asset costs, down to the rental fee on the squad car an officer used on a side gig. It is the rare arrangement where you can look at every party and struggle to find the one getting squeezed.
"Technology in public safety is about 20 years behind."
- Luke Guthrie, Co-founder & Presidentilluno's founding is a small parable about how good products actually start - with one boring, specific problem. The software at its core was originally built to staff security for the Seattle Seahawks. Co-founder David Bloom's cloud-based scheduling tool, forged in the very particular hell of NFL game-day logistics, turned out to generalize.
The company was started in Seattle in 2019 by Luke Guthrie - a firefighter of roughly two decades who had already run a Washington-state staffing agency for off-duty officers - and co-founder Augustus Hellwich. Guthrie retired from firefighting to build it. In 2021 the operation relocated to Plano, Texas, and has since expanded into New York and the Pacific Northwest.
Somewhere along the way it got the attention of Mark Cuban, whose investment firm, Mark Cuban Companies, backed it. Cuban's stated reason was refreshingly free of jargon: it seemed obvious there was a significant need in every major city, and he wanted to learn more. Today CEO Craig Peus - a Stanford biology grad with a background in energy - runs a team of around 23 people.
The near-term ambition is large and specific. illuno is positioning to help staff the 2026 FIFA World Cup, where Arlington will host nine matches expected to draw somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 fans. That is a lot of corners to put a cop on, and a very public test of whether a 99% fill rate holds under stadium-sized load.
A business logs in and creates a security request in the app - time, place, coverage - in a minute or two.
Eligible off-duty officers get real-time notifications and claim the shift from a live dashboard.
Compliance, insurance, scheduling, payment and reporting are automated end to end.
Web and mobile app to create events and hire certified off-duty officers within minutes.
A live dashboard where officers see and claim shifts, with insurance and payment handled.
Automated eligibility, jurisdiction rules and liability coverage on every single shift.
End-to-end processing, payroll and reporting - no manual invoicing.
Free department tools to track and recoup costs, like a squad car's rental fee.
illuno charges the way an airline does: a fixed hourly rate that flexes with location and demand, plus a small flat fee per event. What it pointedly does not charge is everything else.
| Line item | illuno | Legacy staffing agency |
|---|---|---|
| Event fee | $4.95 flat | Markup / margin |
| Subscriptions | None | Common |
| Monthly minimums | None | Common |
| Contracts | None | Typically required |
| Cost to departments | $0 | Varies |
| Turnaround | ~24 hours | 3-5 days |
"What we have is a community-focused, cloud-based platform that any small business or corporation can hire a police officer on an app with one or two minutes of use."
Luke Guthrie, Co-founder"No taxpayer is going to pay for extra police. It gives the business the option to pay for a police officer on their own."
Luke Guthrie, Co-founder"It just seemed obvious to me that there was a significant need in every major city and I wanted to learn more."
Mark Cuban, Investor"[illuno] was an incredibly effective and efficient tool, helping us automate the entire process, from hiring to scheduling to payroll to reporting."
Bob Fletcher, Ramsey County SheriffLuke Guthrie and Augustus Hellwich launch illuno, building on scheduling software originally created to staff Seattle Seahawks security.
Headquarters relocates to Plano, Texas, in the Dallas metro.
Mark Cuban's firm invests, citing clear demand in every major city.
Operations extend into New York and the Pacific Northwest, pulling officers across jurisdictions.
illuno positions to help staff nine World Cup matches in Arlington, expecting 200,000-300,000 fans.
Plenty of apps can send a notification. What is hard, and what illuno bet on, is the plumbing underneath: verifying an officer is eligible to work a given jurisdiction, attaching liability coverage to a specific shift, moving money, and generating the report a city needs after the fact. Those features do not demo well. They are also the reason a sheriff's department signs up. illuno's insight is that in public safety, trust and compliance are the product - the marketplace is just the delivery mechanism.
"I can improve your hiring, improve your retention, recover assets, start tracking, and lessen the risk of your city and your officers."
- Luke Guthrie, Co-founderThe core software was first built to staff Seattle Seahawks stadium security.
Luke Guthrie spent ~20 years as a firefighter before starting the company.
A fixed hourly rate plus a flat $4.95 event fee - nothing else.
Cities can recoup the rental cost of a police vehicle used on a side gig.
Officers come from surrounding departments, not just the local one - that's the fill-rate secret.
Product walkthroughs and press coverage live across illuno's own channels and Dallas-area media. Start here: