Flock Safety and Homegrown Launch $10M Fund to Invest in Atlanta’s Brick-and-Mortar Businesses

A local fintech and Atlanta’s security-focused giant are teaming up to invest directly into brick-and-mortar businesses.

Flock Safety, the safety technology platform with a national customer base, announced this week it was partnering with local startup Homegrown to provide $10 million towards the launch of the Thriving Cities Fund.

The initial funds will provide growth capital to high-performing locally focused small businesses with the goal of “catalyzing community safety, economic vitality, and long-term prosperity in cities across the country,” according to a press release.

The fund will start by deploying capital in Metro Atlanta area businesses. While no fund recipients have been named yet, Homegrown founder and CEO Michael Davis said they will be passing the $1 million in deployed capital mark in the coming weeks.

How the Thriving Cities Fund Works

The Thriving Cities Fund is built on top of Homegrown’s platform, which provides non-dilutive and revenue-based financing options to small businesses and brick-and-mortar stores. Even if Atlantans haven’t directly heard of Homegrown, they’ve likely seen its growth capital in action. The startup helped neighborhood work club Switchyards add 22 new locations to its portfolio and ramen restaurant Jinya open three new locations.

The fund will help businesses like restaurants, salons, barbershops, coffee shops, and neighborhood clubs secure capital to open new locations, according to the Thriving Cities Fund website. Deal sizes will range from $100,000 to $1 million.

To date, Homegrown has deployed $7 million into local businesses, which has translated into 40 new brick-and-mortar locations and over 500 new jobs across the country.

Such funding is important for small businesses trying to navigate macroeconomic realities of today, Davis added.

“Right now, it’s an incredibly hard moment to be an entrepreneur in America. Costs are up. Margins are thin. Capital is scarce. Yet these are the people fueling our neighborhoods, hiring locally, and holding up the economy’s foundation,” Davis told Hypepotamus. “But when you look around at the support systems available to them? It’s night and day compared to what VC-backed tech founders get. We’re building something that levels the playing field and gives real-world entrepreneurs the tools, support, and capital they’ve always deserved. When these entrepreneurs need capital, they have to navigate a minefield of options that all have hugely negative downsides. The stress of navigating this actually stops growth from happening. It’s hard enough to run a brick-and-mortar business already, and that’s before you realize that most of the growth financing landscape ignores them.”

“We want to become the missing growth layer in American small business financing,” he added.

Flock’s View On Community Safety

The partnership is part of Flock Safety’s evolving mission around tech’s position in building safer communities.

“When we launched Flock Safety in 2017, we had a mission to eliminate crime. But over the years, we’ve learned that building safer communities takes more than just solving crimes — it requires a more holistic approach,” founder and CEO Garrett Langley told Hypepotamus. “Public safety and community prosperity go hand in hand. By helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses, create jobs, and build spaces where people can connect, we’re fostering the trust, opportunity, and shared success that safer neighborhoods are built on.”

The Thriving Cities Fund will focus on “investing in small businesses to help create safer, more vibrant communities,” he added.

While Langley and Davis are building in distinct tech verticals — security infrastructure and financial technologies, respectively — Davis said that he found common ground when he started talking to Langley about what enables communities to thrive.

“[We realized] that we were both driving towards the same goal but from different vantage points – safety and growth capital, respectively. We both believe in the power of local businesses and entrepreneurship, and teaming up to provide real growth capital at scale excited both of us enough to go take this leap,” Davis told Hypepotamus.

Flock Safety has been expanding recently through new manufacturing sites, cap table growth, and strategic technology acquisitions.

In spring the company closed a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and other global investors and opened a 97,000-square-foot facility manufacturing facility in Smyrna, Georgia. Last year the company acquired the Drone as First Responder (DFR) company Aerodrome.

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