public-safety
(34)
Tyler Technologies
Tyler Technologies built a $2.3 billion business in the least glamorous corner of software: the machinery of government. Its advantage is not a single killer app, but a web of systems that makes switching difficult and public work increasingly connected.
Enghouse Systems
How a quiet Markham software company turned buying unloved businesses into a decades-long compounding machine - one contact center, video platform, and telecom system at a time.
Quantela Inc.
Quantela is a smart-city technology company that helps cities and communities digitize urban infrastructure through an AI- and IoT-powered data platform. Founded in 2015, it evolved from a dashboard tool into a full urban infrastructure platform spanning smart lighting, traffic, public safety, digital advertising and citizen services. Quantela is known for pioneering an 'outcomes-based' business model, funding projects up front in exchange for a share of the resulting revenue or savings, and operates across the Americas, EMEA, India and Asia-Pacific.
Bulzi, Inc.
Bulzi, Inc. (styled Bulzī, pronounced 'bulls-eye') is a dual-use technology company that uses edge-AI and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to deliver situational awareness, security, and safety solutions. Originally built to measure out-of-home advertising audiences by passively detecting nearby mobile devices, Bulzi adapted its RF-sensing platform for defense and public-safety missions with roughly $2M in SBIR funding from the U.S. Air Force and Army. Its products span passive C5ISR sensing (SAFER), base access control (z-BASE), and medical-grade vital-signs monitoring (BioSCOUT), serving warfighters and first responders alongside commercial advertising customers.
Corti
Corti is a Copenhagen-based healthcare AI company that builds clinical-grade models and APIs helping developers and health systems automate medical conversations. Its Symphony model powers speech-to-text, medical coding, clinical note generation, and agentic workflows, serving roughly 100 million patient interactions a year across providers, insurers, EHR vendors, and public-safety dispatch centers - including the NHS. Corti positions itself as privacy-compliant, healthcare-specialized infrastructure that outperforms general-purpose models on medical tasks.
Zencity
Zencity is a govtech company that builds the leading platform for community trust, purpose-built for local government. It combines AI-driven social listening, statistically representative resident surveys, and communication tools to help cities, counties, and public safety agencies understand what residents think and turn that input into decisions, budgets, and policy. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Zencity works with more than 600 government agencies and has raised roughly $93M in venture funding.
Airspace Defense
Airspace Defense (formerly Airspace Systems) is a Silicon Valley company that secures the low-altitude airspace where drones increasingly operate. Its patented Airspace Spatial platform fuses Remote ID, RF and electronic sensing, radar and AI analytics to detect, identify and track unauthorized drones and their operators at city scale. Founded in 2015 by a team from Apple, Google and Cisco, the company serves public safety agencies, national defense and major enterprises, and its autonomous Interceptor drone is held in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Obvio
Obvio is a San Carlos, California startup building solar-powered, AI-equipped camera pylons that watch intersections for dangerous driving - running stop signs, speeding, illegal turns, crosswalk violations and distracted driving. The cameras process footage on-device, flag only genuine violations for human review, and hand verified cases to local police, who decide whether to issue citations. Obvio installs the hardware for municipalities at no upfront cost and earns revenue from a share of citation fees. Founded by former Motive engineers Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari, the company raised a $22 million Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures in June 2025 and reports that early Maryland deployments cut stop-sign running by roughly 50-70%.
Athena Security Inc.
Athena Security is an Austin-based physical-security company that builds AI-powered concealed weapons detection and visitor management systems for schools, hospitals, casinos, businesses and public venues. Founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneurs Lisa Falzone and Chris Ciabarra (the pair behind iPad point-of-sale pioneer Revel Systems), Athena combines walk-through metal detection, thermal imaging, lidar, cameras and machine learning to screen roughly one person per second - up to 3,600 people an hour - without asking anyone to empty their pockets or bags. Its flagship Apollo 500 system uses colored light boxes to show operators exactly where a suspected weapon is on the body, and its screening-compliance software helps organizations meet a growing patchwork of state security laws.
Biometrica (aka Safience)
Biometrica - now operating under the name Safience - is a Las Vegas-based public-safety and identity-intelligence company that helps law enforcement, casinos, schools and critical infrastructure find specific threats and missing victims without watching everyone. Its platform pairs a law-enforcement-only database of verified identities (UMbRA) with edge sensors (RTIS/RVIS) that capture a single still image, purge non-matches immediately, and store no biometric data on the device. The company's pitch is deliberately contrarian for its industry: public safety without mass surveillance, summed up in its tagline 'Being Big Brother Is a Choice.'
Guardian RF
Guardian RF builds low-cost, passive radiofrequency sensors that make low-altitude airspace observable in real time. Founded in 2024 by three Georgetown physics majors, the company deploys palm-sized 'Scout' sensors that detect the control signals drones and their operators emit, triangulating both across a mesh network. Its systems have been battle-tested on the front lines in Ukraine and are now fielded at Vandenberg Space Force Base and across U.S. airports and event venues, turning drone detections into structured, shareable intelligence.
Human Trafficking Institute
The Human Trafficking Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that fights modern slavery by going after the people who profit from it. Founded in 2015 by two former U.S. Department of Justice trafficking prosecutors, HTI embeds veteran experts inside criminal justice systems - training police and prosecutors, building specialized anti-trafficking units, and supplying the investigative tools and data needed to convict traffickers. It runs field programs in Uganda and Belize and publishes the annual Federal Human Trafficking Report, the only dataset compiling every U.S. federal trafficking case since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.
KARDA, Inc.
KARDA, Inc. is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that turns police body-worn camera footage into fully drafted, court-ready reports in minutes. Founded in 2023 by Stanford-trained engineer Armando Torres, KARDA uses video and audio analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning to cut the two-to-four hours officers spend on daily paperwork down to roughly ten minutes. The platform is FBI CJIS compliant, uses end-to-end encryption, integrates with existing Records Management Systems, and adds a multilingual kiosk for non-emergency community crime reporting.
Recidiviz
Recidiviz is a nonprofit technology company that stitches together the fragmented data trapped inside America's prison, parole and probation systems and turns it into usable tools. Its platform - and its newer AI-powered Case Planning Assistant - helps corrections agencies in roughly 19 states surface people eligible for early release, automate case triage, and connect returning citizens to housing, treatment and jobs. Founded in 2019 as a volunteer project at Google, Recidiviz's mission is to accelerate progress toward a smaller, fairer, safer justice system.
Tele911
Tele911 is a telemedicine company that diverts low-acuity 911 calls away from crowded emergency rooms by connecting patients on scene with board-certified emergency physicians over video, on average within about 40 seconds. Founded by physician-entrepreneur Dr. Ramon Lizardo, the company equips paramedics and medics as the doctor's hands, eyes, and ears so patients can be treated in place instead of being transported to a hospital - reducing unnecessary ambulance trips, ED visits, and cost. The model has reached millions of lives across multiple states and positions itself as the nation's leading ER-diversion and virtual emergency department solution.
Armando Torres
Armando Torres is the co-founder and CEO of KARDA, Inc., a San Francisco AI startup that turns body-camera footage and other media into court-ready police reports in minutes. A Stanford-trained chemical engineer, Gates Scholar, and Milken Scholar from Paramount, California, he pivoted from energy and biomedical R&D to building CJIS-compliant generative AI that aims to give officers back hours of their shift. KARDA has worked with U.S. agencies including the Boston Police Department and raised a $200K seed round in 2024.
Michael Green
Michael Green is the CEO and co-founder of Athena Security, an Austin-based company that builds AI-powered concealed weapons detection systems for schools, hospitals, casinos, and other public spaces. A Harvard-educated former family-business operator turned compliance-software builder, Green pivoted into physical security after surviving a close encounter with gunfire. He leads a roughly 110-person company that has raised $18.6 million to keep guns out of the places where people gather.
Wyly Wade
Wyly Wade is the CEO of Biometrica Systems (also operating as Safience), a Las Vegas and Virginia-based company that links physical and digital information to help prevent crime, identify threats, and recover victims. A self-taught coder who published his first video game at age ten and fixed a bug in Lotus Notes 4 while barely out of his teens, Wade has spent more than two decades at the intersection of biometrics, cybersecurity, and public policy. He helped build biometric standards for the U.S. passport, advised the ICAO on e-passports, and was part of the founding core team behind India's Aadhaar, the largest biometric identity program on Earth. Today he is pushing Biometrica toward a privacy-first, biometric-free model of threat and victim detection.
Polaris Wireless
Polaris Wireless is a Silicon Valley company that pinpoints where a mobile phone is - not just on a map, but on which floor of a building. Founded in 1999, it pioneered software-based Wireless Location Signatures (WLS) and high-accuracy 3D / z-axis location, technology used by wireless carriers and public safety agencies so that when someone dials 911 from the 30th floor, responders know which floor. With 90+ patents and 50+ deployments worldwide, Polaris turns radio noise into vertical certainty for E911, IoT, smart cities and enterprise applications.
VANTIQ
VANTIQ is a Walnut Creek, California software company that builds a low-code platform for real-time, distributed, event-driven applications. The platform acts as a master orchestrator for agentic AI, generative AI, edge computing and IoT - letting enterprises sense events as they happen, reason over them with AI and multi-agent systems, and act in the moment for mission-critical outcomes across healthcare, defense, disaster response, manufacturing, energy and the public sector.
Bounce Imaging
Bounce Imaging makes softball-sized, throwable 360-degree cameras that first responders, law enforcement, and military teams toss into dangerous spaces to see what is inside before they enter. Founded out of MIT and the Harvard Innovation Lab after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the company builds low-cost, rugged imaging and robotics systems - including the Explorer and the world's first thermal throwable camera, the Pit Viper 360 - that stream real-time omnidirectional video to a phone or tablet. Its devices are used by the FBI, U.S. Marshals, the Department of Defense, and more than 450 state and local agencies.
Moonshot
Moonshot is a London-founded technology and intelligence company that maps and disrupts online harms - from violent extremism and disinformation to gender-based violence, human trafficking, and harassment of public figures. Founded in 2015 by Vidhya Ramalingam and Ross Frenett, the firm pairs data science, OSINT, and behavioral research with field interventions like its pioneering Redirect Method, which steers people searching for extremist content toward safer alternatives. It works for governments, technology platforms (Google, Facebook, Spotify), and, more recently, sports organizations protecting athletes from online abuse.
Francisco Aguilar
Francisco Aguilar is the founder and CEO of Bounce Imaging, the company behind a softball-sized, throwable 360-degree camera that lets police, firefighters and soldiers see inside dangerous spaces before stepping into them. He conceived the idea as a graduate student at MIT and Harvard after watching rescuers struggle to find survivors in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The original Explorer earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2012; the thermal-equipped Pit Viper 360 repeated the honor in 2024. Today his cameras are used by 300-plus police and fire departments and by defense customers including U.S. Special Operations Command.
MD Ally | 911 Network Navigation
MD Ally is a New York-based health-tech company that plugs telehealth directly into the 911 system. Founded in 2018 by Shanel Fields, the daughter of a volunteer EMT, the platform adds a 'virtual response tier' so dispatchers can route non-emergency callers to the right care instead of automatically sending an ambulance and an ER trip. By partnering with public-safety agencies and insurance payors, MD Ally cuts unnecessary emergency costs while connecting patients to telehealth, mental health and social services.
Reveal Technology
Reveal Technology is a veteran-founded defense software company in Bozeman, Montana, building AI tools that work at the tactical edge - offline, under fire, and in real time. Its flagship products, Farsight (rapid geospatial intelligence from drone video) and Identifi (tactical mobile biometrics), are fielded with the U.S. Army, Special Operations Command, the Marine Corps, and allied forces. The company's pitch is simple: when the cloud disappears, the mission can't.
Somewear Labs
Somewear Labs builds satellite-powered hardware and a software-defined network that keep defense, government, and emergency-response teams connected when conventional networks fail. Its pocket-sized devices automatically route mission data across mesh radios and satellite links, integrate with tactical systems like ATAK, and serve users from helicopter paramedics and wildland firefighters to U.S. special operators.
Ben Rudolph
Ben Rudolph is the co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco-based public safety data platform that raised $190M at a $2.5B valuation in 2025. A Stanford Computer Science graduate and former NCAA gymnastics All-American, Rudolph pivoted from Silicon Valley offers to spend two years building humanitarian tech for UNHCR's refugee camps before co-founding Peregrine with his college gymnastics teammate Nick Noone. Today, Peregrine's platform serves law enforcement agencies covering more than 80 million Americans, unifying fragmented data from body cameras, dispatch records, and crime databases into a single real-time intelligence system.
Pano AI
Pano AI builds an integrated platform for early wildfire detection and situational awareness, combining 360-degree ultra-high-definition mountaintop cameras, satellite feeds, field sensors and AI models to spot fires within minutes of ignition. Used by fire agencies, electric utilities, governments and private landowners, Pano monitors nearly 30 million acres across the US, Canada and Australia from its San Francisco headquarters.
Sonia Kastner
Sonia Kastner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pano AI, a San Francisco-based climate technology company building AI-powered wildfire early detection and response infrastructure. Combining 360-degree mountaintop cameras, satellite imagery, and deep learning AI with a 24/7 human intelligence center, Pano AI monitors 24-30 million acres across the U.S., Australia, and Canada - alerting first responders to over 100 fires annually. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies of 2025, recognized on BBC's 100 Women 2023, and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Kastner brings a Harvard physics degree, Stanford MBA, and deep hardware/supply chain experience from Nest, PAX, and NYC government to the frontier of climate resilience.
Peregrine
Peregrine is a San Francisco-based data intelligence platform that unifies fragmented public safety data - from body-worn cameras and CAD records to RMS and ALPR feeds - into a single, searchable system for law enforcement, fire-rescue, EMS, and emergency management agencies. Founded in 2018 by ex-Palantir operators, it now serves jurisdictions covering more than 80 million Americans and reached a $2.5B valuation after a $190M Series C led by Sequoia in March 2025.