July 28, 2025
Venture capitalists have made a flurry of bets on public-safety and law-enforcement technology startups this year, the latest sign of a shifting appetite toward companies that rely on government revenue.
Venture firms, including industry leaders Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, have invested in tech ranging from artificial-intelligence voice chatbots that handle nonemergency 911 calls to analytics software that helps detectives solve cold cases. The deals propelled the sector’s overall U.S. funding haul to $990 million this year through July 9, nearly double the amount raised for all of last year, according to data firm Crunchbase.
Investors and entrepreneurs have long viewed plodding government sales cycles as incompatible with the hypergrowth many startups seek. But that’s changing. As AI supercharges the startups’ tech and lowers the cost of developing new products, founders say public-safety agencies are more eager and amenable to doing business with them.
Investors, in turn, are warming to young companies that rely on government sales. The recent success of defense-tech startups—many of them powered by AI—has demonstrated that startups with government-reliant revenue models can make it.
“The ‘Why now’ is AI,” said Nihal Mehta, co-founder and general partner of Eniac Ventures. Read rest here.