Flock Safety Investor Ties to Toka: What Taxpayers Should Know

As police departments across the country hand over millions in taxpayer dollars for Flock’s camera network, a new question is surfacing: who is really backing the technology meant to hold evidence secure — and can it be trusted?

Could the camera watching your street be altered without a trace? That question is no longer hypothetical.

Flock Safety has become one of the fastest-growing surveillance companies in America, with cameras deployed by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies [company data, Flock Safety] across 49 states. But a newly surfaced investment link is raising uncomfortable questions about who actually controls the technology behind the badge — and whether taxpayers have any real oversight over it.

Who Is Bankrolling Flock’s Surveillance Empire?
Flock Safety builds AI-powered license plate readers, gunshot detectors, and camera networks now used by thousands of police departments, homeowners associations, and schools. In March 2025, venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz led a $275 million funding round that helped push Flock’s valuation to $7.5 billion [company funding data]. Other investors included Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Tiger Global.
Andreessen Horowitz did not just write Flock a check. It has also served as a longtime investor in a very different kind of company — one whose core product is the ability to compromise camera systems, not protect them.

What Does Toka Actually Do?
Toka is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm that Andreessen Horowitz backed as early as its 2018 seed round. According to internal company documents reviewed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Toka’s technology can locate security cameras and webcams within a given area, hack into them, monitor live feeds, and alter both live and previously recorded footage — reportedly without leaving a detectable trace [Haaretz reporting].
Toka does not sell to the general public. Its client base is limited to governments, militaries, intelligence services, and law enforcement agencies, and its work is regulated by Israel’s Ministry of Defense. TechCrunch reported in late 2024 that Toka has been actively recruiting to expand its footprint inside U.S. law enforcement and national security markets, including a “Client Director USA” role focused on selling into American police and defense agencies.
Toka was co-founded by Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. Barak has faced years of public scrutiny in Israeli media over his past visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s properties, an association he has publicly acknowledged. No evidence has connected that history to Toka’s operations, and it should not be read as more than what it is: a fact worth noting, not an accusation.

Why Does This Overlap Matter Right Now?
This is not a case of two unrelated companies sharing a logo. It is the same venture capital firm sitting on both sides of a technology category where trust and tamper-proof evidence are the entire point. Flock markets its cameras to police departments as reliable digital evidence for solving crimes. Toka markets its technology, in part, on the premise that footage from similar systems can be silently rewritten.

Is This the Accountability Moment Taxpayers Deserve?
Local governments sign multi-year contracts for Flock’s hardware and cloud subscriptions using public funds, often without competitive bidding or public hearings on data security. Few of those contracts appear to ask a basic question: does the company supplying our evidence system have any financial relationship with a firm capable of undermining that same evidence?

If your city can’t answer who controls the integrity of its surveillance footage, why is it still signing the check?

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the exact kind of due-diligence question city councils and county boards are supposed to ask before approving public safety technology contracts, and in most jurisdictions, nobody has asked it yet.

Who Is Really Paying for This Blind Spot?
Taxpayers fund Flock’s contracts. Defendants rely on the footage those contracts produce to prove their innocence or guilt. Crime victims depend on that same footage holding up in court. Every one of those parties has a direct stake in knowing whether the evidence chain can be trusted — yet none of them were part of the conversation when these investment ties were formed.

Is there any good-faith reason for a security technology company to build a product whose primary function is altering footage without detection?

What Do the Numbers Actually Tell Us?
Flock says its network has helped agencies solve approximately one million crimes [company claim, unverified by independent audit]. That number gets repeated in press coverage and city council presentations alike.

One million. The question no city council has publicly answered: how many of those cases depended on footage from a network whose lead financial backer also funds a company built to alter footage undetected?

What Do Supporters of This Policy Actually Believe?
Supporters of expanding camera networks like Flock’s argue the technology genuinely works — that license plate readers and connected cameras have measurably helped departments clear cases faster, deter repeat offenders, and give smaller police forces investigative tools once reserved for major cities. They point out that a shared investor is not proof of shared conduct; Andreessen Horowitz has thousands of portfolio companies, and no evidence shows Toka’s tools have ever touched Flock’s systems.
That argument deserves a fair hearing. Common ownership alone does not establish wrongdoing, and Flock maintains its own security practices, including a 30-day data deletion policy. But the fair response to that defense is not to dismiss the concern — it is to demand the same transparency requirements be applied to the companies handling public safety evidence that would be applied to any other vendor managing sensitive government data. Trust should be verified, not assumed, especially when public money and due process are on the line.

Are Our Local Leaders Even Asking the Right Questions?
Most city and county procurement processes for surveillance technology were not built with this kind of cross-investment scenario in mind. Oakland and Alameda County, like hundreds of other jurisdictions, have weighed Flock contracts largely on cost and crime-reduction claims, not on the financial architecture standing behind the company. That gap is exactly where accountability tends to disappear.

What Happens If No One Speaks Up?
If local oversight bodies do not start asking who stands behind their surveillance vendors, taxpayers will keep funding technology they cannot fully audit, and defendants will keep relying on evidence chains nobody has independently stress-tested. The fix does not require banning the technology. It requires basic disclosure: contracts should identify major investors, and cities should be able to ask direct questions about conflicts of interest before signing.

Key Questions This Story Raises

• Has any independent audit ever verified that Flock’s footage cannot be altered by outside actors?
• Should cities require surveillance vendors to disclose ties to companies capable of compromising similar systems?
• Who is accountable if evidence used to convict — or exonerate — someone is ever found to be unreliable?

So the real question isn’t whether Andreessen Horowitz did anything illegal by investing in both companies. It’s whether the public was ever given the chance to weigh that conflict before the cameras went up on their street.

The cameras aren’t going away. The only question left is whether anyone in charge of approving them is willing to ask who else is holding the keys.

Still have questions about who’s really behind the technology watching your community? Stay informed — subscribe for daily accountability coverage. Think your neighbors need to see this? Share the article. Want your voice to count? Contact your city council or county board before the next surveillance contract renewal and ask whether vendor investment ties were disclosed during procurement.