Nick Noone has fallen on his face in front of thousands of people countless times. The son of a mechanic who moonlighted as a mural painter and a Montessori school teacher was a member of Stanford University’s men’s gymnastics team where he met his teammate and future cofounder, Ben Rudolph. Years later, after a stint at Palantir, Noone climbed into a Honda Accord with Rudolph and started cold-calling police chiefs to build a public safety platform for law enforcement.
That origin story is now Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco-based AI data integration platform built from the back of a detective division in San Pablo, California. Peregrine raised $250 million in Series D funding at a $6.8 billion valuation, Fortune learned exclusively. The round was led by existing investors, including Fifth Down Capital, Sequoia Capital, OG Venture Partners, Goldcrest Capital, XYZ Ventures, and Godfrey Capital.
Peregrine’s Series C round valued it at $2.5 billion just 15 months ago—a nearly 3x jump in a single funding cycle. Noone declined to share revenue, but said the company has more than doubled its customer base over the past year, now serving more than 400 agencies and organizations representing roughly 125 million people across North America. He expects to be working with close to 1,000 cities by year-end.
The platform does something deceptively simple: it connects all the data a government agency already has—police records, 911 logs, permit databases, sensor feeds, emergency management systems—and makes it searchable and usable in real time, without collecting or owning any of it.
Think of it as a search engine for a city’s own institutional memory, with role-based access controls and a full audit trail baked in so supervisors can see who looked at what and why. Noone described the product as giving public safety leaders “the information they need to make their best possible decision in really critical moments.” That includes identifying a child abduction suspect in minutes, coordinating hurricane evacuations, or, right now, running the security fusion center for eight of the 11 host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Rudolph, Peregrine’s CTO, previously built data infrastructure for refugees at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and worked at global health tech firm Dimagi. Noone ran Palantir’s Special Operations business, including work on the intelligence platform used to track ISIS in Syria.
That duo has made Peregrine one of the fastest-growing companies in the govtech AI space, a market valued at roughly $25 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $109 billion by 2035. But it’s also put the company squarely in the crosshairs of the civil liberties debate swirling around AI and law enforcement.
A 2026 ITIF survey found that 54% of Americans believe AI-powered mass surveillance is too dangerous. Community members have shown up at city council meetings to oppose Peregrine contracts, citing the company’s Palantir DNA. When asked about these points of tension, Noone didn’t flinch. “Silicon Valley has largely failed the American government, especially at the state and local level,” he told Fortune. “Governance controls and audit trails have unfortunately been abused by public sales and marketing—often after organizations made a mistake. Broken promises have broken trust. I don’t think words are enough.”
The company’s answer is to stop talking about what it can do and let existing customers do the talking instead—a “show, don’t tell” posture it has deployed in every contested procurement. Peregrine doesn’t use facial recognition, doesn’t create or collect new data, and builds active flagging mechanisms, not passive ones, when data is misused.
Whether those guardrails are sufficient in a market this politically charged remains the open question. And competitors like Flock Safety, an $8.4 billion AI camera network company, have learned what happens when the backlash catches up to the product.
Peregrine’s new capital will fund product development, engineering and implementation hiring, international expansion, and a liquidity opportunity for employees. Noone said the company hasn’t yet decided whether to go public, but is building the internal infrastructure to be ready.
“We aspire to have an incredibly hygienic private organization that could be prepared in the future to operate as a public entity,” he explained. “But demand from investors has outstripped supply, and we want to give liquidity to people who’ve been building with us.”
An IPO, in other words, is not off the table—it’s just not the point.
The point, at least according to Noone, is a modern, trusted data architecture for every community in America, and eventually, the world.
“What is the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy for a city?” he asked. “Safety plus the feeling of safety. That’s what empowers people to be their best selves.”
