He worked out of a police department for free for a year—then built a $6.8B company. | Ben Rudolph, Co-Founder of Peregrine

Peregrine turned free police work into a $6.8B company

Peregrine is a public safety software company valued at $6.8bn, and its route there ran through the back of a police department. Ben Rudolph and his co-founder worked as unpaid crime analysts for over a year, which gave them the credibility and data access to build a platform that unifies scattered records. Deployment is half the product because agencies buy trust and embedded value.

Takeaways

• Embedding free in a police department won the first customer. Ben Rudolph and his co-founder spent twelve to eighteen months inside the San Pablo Police Department working cases with detectives as unpaid crime analysts, writing software to do the work. Commander Brian Bubar said yes after many others refused.
• The product turns scattered records into one data asset. It pulls disparate data such as cellular records spread across dozens of Excel files in different time zones into one current complete asset, then transforms and enriches it to provide applications on top. Ben calls it half technology and half deployment and partnership.
• Deployment is half the product, not overhead. Peregrine sent one of its first engineering hires to Pittsburgh for three weeks to integrate data and get embedded with the department. It built a platform so non-engineers could integrate data. Margins are tight early but better once the technology is embedded.
• Average contract value is around $250,000. ACV is around $250,000, up from perhaps $50,000 to $100,000 early on, with very good retention. Growth followed simplifying the message and hiring account executives across the country, with nine-to-twelve month sales cycles and ARR going one, three, ten.
• Scaling deployment became the bottleneck after early growth. Once customer counts reached dozens around 2023, resourcing deployment off a spreadsheet stopped working, so Peregrine built a deployment strategy function. Before that, the hardest challenge was go-to-market and a phase in the wilderness.
• Penetration creates a snowball effect across agencies. Ben says penetration in an area makes the next customer easier because the state or city is more familiar with Peregrine. As growth snowballed, fundraising became easier and the business was judged on its metrics.
• Credibility and trust land the first deal. Ben says a big technology purchase done well can move a buyer up the ladder while a bad one can hurt them. Peregrine earns the right by researching a target's priorities and building demos on data resembling the customer's own.

How Peregrine won the California wildfire contract

1. At Christmas 2020 Peregrine pursued a California emergency operations and wildfire rescue RFP that Ben says was probably written for another billion dollar company.