21st century crime fighters from CNBC.
Scott Crouch, Mark43 co-founder and CEO, explains how his company is using cloud computing to change the way police work is done.
“There are over 180,000 felons on the loose in the United States that police can’t track,” says Scott Crouch, CEO and cofounder of Mark43. And this 23-year-old Harvard grad is building a cloud-based records management and analytics system whose goal is to make policing smarter, more efficient, and more accountable. Crouch’s platform is a web app that makes it easier and faster for cops to enter arrest and incident reports, reducing a process that can take several hours on decades-old legacy systems to about 30 minutes. Mark43 then adds a layer of algorithmic intelligence, connecting data such as social media activity and phone records (obtained via warrant) to those police reports to give even patrol cops a more complete picture of a criminal or a syndicate.
The company, which was born out of a junior-year engineering class project, has taken a methodical, anthropological approach to product development. Crouch and his cofounder Flo Mayr went to West Point to get military training in network analysis and intelligence, and they and their third cofounder Matt Polega regularly go on ride-alongs with police to gauge the real-world conditions in which their clients would be using their software. It’s the only way to build respect and get the credibility that the company needs, Crouch says, and it has yielded valuable insights into how to deliver useful information to an officer whose adrenaline and heart rate may be elevated in the midst of a high-speed chase, for example. These cops, often around the same age as Crouch, Mayr, and Polega, grew up on Facebook and other consumer web services, so they resolved to give them a much more friendly interface to input and analyze data.
Mark43 is already in use by Los Angeles County Gang Taskforce and soon will be officially deployed across an entire major metropolitan department. “If we can change the way they collect data,” Crouch says, “we can change the way police work is done.”
In the movie Iron Man 3, Tony Stark had a new Iron Man suit that he called Mark 42 (that is, the forty-second version of the suit that he built). The company Mark43 is named after the suit—a statement that it is the next generation of crime-fighting.
It’s a wonderful time for under-30 somethings to jump into enterprise technology. The market for software, hardware, security and services that helps businesses and government run better, faster and more cheaply is undergoing a massive shift as technology moves to the cloud and delivers automation and productivity to mobile devices at one’s fingertips. The legacy players such as HP, IBM and EMC are struggling to grow amid a siege by startups run by people barely ten years out of college.
Even though one tends to find more grey-haired people in enterprise tech , we found enough young leaders to field a separate Enterprise 30 Under 30 for the first time this year. (See the consumer tech 30 Under 30 here). The enterprise boom is reflected in venture funding trends: Investments in enterprise services firms in the first nine months of 2014 was up 42% to $18.6 billion from $13 billion, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Funding for consumer services fell 7.1% to $429 million from $462 million the previous year. The fourth quarter figures will likely reinforce the trend, and 2015 will see a rash of high-quality enterprise startups go public or raise venture funding at healthy valuations based on solid growth in the markets for cloud computing, mobile device management, Big Data, cybersecurity and software development tools.Enterprise may not produce cultural headliners such as a Twitter, Facebook or Uber, but the mass impact of the dizzying array of B2B firms from Appirio, Aperian, Apptio to Zenpayroll, Zendesk and Zenefits is likely much greater. It’s God’s work selling the tools that help businesses run faster and more intelligently at lower costs. Join me in congratulating this year’s 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Tech, an eclectic bunch chosen based on their success at leading a team building tools that will change the face of business or government, and create profitable revenue growth. They could fall flat on their faces, but we think that’s highly unlikely. A big thanks to our category judges, who helped narrow down the nominees and provide important insights: Dan Levin, COO at Box; Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures; Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners. Fadel Adib, 25, Ph.D. candidate at MIT As an MIT grad student, Adib was part of the team that created WiTrack, a spin on Wi-Fi that uses a radio signal–just 1% as strong as Wi-Fi and 0.1% of your smartphone’s signal–to track movements with incredible accuracy.
Scott Crouch, 23, Florian Mayr, 24, Matt Polega, 24, cofounders, Mark43 These three Harvard classmates were inspired by their work with police in Springfield, Mass., to develop an easy-to-use law enforcement cloud software platform. Mark43 raised $1.95 million in funding in 2013, and plans to launch its software with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department next year.
Baldwin Cunningham, 26, cofounder, Partnered Cunningham started Partnered to create a self-serve digital network for big brands and startups that want to connect based on mutual business interests. Partnered has brokered 208 deals in the past four months. It’s backed by Y Combinator and has raised $1.6 million from Sherpa Ventures and other top Silicon Valley VCs. Cunningham has hustle: He introduced himself to one investor during a shared cab ride and got the guy to put money into Partnered. Nicholas Desmarias, 29, and Daniel Saks, 29, cofounders, AppDirect Dan Saks and Nicholas Desmarais founded AppDirect in 2009 as an app marketplace for companies instead of consumers. AppDirect raised $35 million in its most recent round of funding and has acquired three companies, including data visualization company Leftronics this November. The company hopes to double its revenue for the fifth straight year next year. Maisie Devine, 26, and Isaac Rothenbaum, 25, cofounders, Poacht Devine and Rothenbaum built a service that lets job seekers discreetly look for new gigs by covertly informing potential new employers about their requirements upfront (salary, benefits, culture) In its first 6 months, more than 250 employers (including 7 Global 2000 firms) have signed up to recruit through and posted thousands of job listings. Paul Doersch, 26, founder, Kespry In October, the Kespry founder and CEO raised a $10 million Series A led by Lightspeed Ventures. His company manufactures commercial-grade drones for businesses that want to capture aerial images. Taso Du Val, 29, cofounder, Top Tal Du Val started Toptal to connect companies with the best software engineers around the world. Du Val says Toptal is profitable and on track to do nearly $100 million in sales for 2015. The company is rumored to be valued at north of half a billion dollars. Calvin French-Owen, 25, Peter Reinhardt, 25, Ian Storm Taylor, 24, Ilya Volodarsky, 25, cofounders, SegmentSegment helps companies use servers, apps, and plug-ins to collect and analyze customer data. In the past year, it has grown from just four cofounders with no revenue to a staff of 30 who have raised $17.6 million in funding. Dmitri Gaskin, 19, CTO, Branchmetrics Nineteen-year-old Dmitri Gaskin dropped out of Stanford in his first semester and is now CTO of Branchmetrics, a startup that helps apps interact easily with each other through deep links. The company has has grown from 10,000 devices to more than 100 million in just three months, raising $3 million in funding in September. Ishan Gulrajani, 20, cofounder, Watchsend Thiel Fellow Ishaan Gulrajani dropped out of MIT to start a company allows developers to record users’ phone screens in order to learn and improve their app. Last year he organized HackMIT, one of the biggest hackathons in the world and the first ever of its scale at MIT. HackMIT had 20 organizers, 1,050 attendees and a $250,000 budget raised from over 70 sponsors. Jilliene Helman, 28, founder, Realty Mogul The former Union Bank vice president quit her job to start Realty Mogul in 2012. The fast-growing Los Angeles company crowdfunds investment pools for commercial property. So far its members have invested more than $50 million in more than 150 properties in over 20 states and returned more than $6 million to investors. Helman’s goal is to become the fastest-acting lender in the real estate game. William Hockey, 25, Zach Perret, 27, cofounders, Plaid Perret and Hockey used their experience working at Bain to create an API to make banking data easier for developers to use. Plaid raised $2.8 million in funding in 2013, and its infrastructure is used by many top financial apps such as PayPal, Venmo and Robinhood. Nancy Hua, 29, founder, Apptimize Hua’s company created software that helps mobile teams build and tune apps faster through A/B testing. Prior to Apptimize, Nancy made millions as an algorithmic trader and led the GETCO Quantitative Strategies team. Nancy studied math with computer science at MIT and led the MIT fencing team. Joanna Huey, 29, Associate Director, Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy Joanna merged her expertise in law and her entrepreneurial bent to cofound Casetext, which raised $1.8 million in funding to make the law free and understandable to everyone. Huey now directs the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, studying how policy can address the challenges of the digital age. Jay Kaplan, 29, cofounder, Synack Jay Kaplan and his cofounder Mark Kuhr left the NSA’s counterterrorism division in 2013 to start Synack, which creates bug-bounty programs on behalf of companies that want to squash security vulnerabilities from their code. Synack has raised more than $9 million in funding. Dan Kimerling, 28, Zach Townsend, 28, Standard Treasury After first meeting at Harvard Summer School as teenagers, Dan Kimerling and Zachary Townsend later worked together at Y Combinator to simplify commercial banking through their startup, aptly named Simple Treasury. The company makes it easier for companies to add electronic checks, foreign excanges, and other financial services to their websites and apps. Marcin Kleczynski, 25, founder, Malwarebytes Kleczynski started the company in 2008 on the belief that everyone has “a fundamental right to a malware-free existence.” He raised $30 million in Series A funding in June to fuel the firm’s global expansion. Andrew Levy, 29, cofounder, Crittercism After cofounding Y Combinator company AdThrow, Andrew Levy started mobile app performance management firm Crittercism in 2011. Before that, Levy worked at HP Software and defense and intelligence companies including Silicon Graphics, Northrop Grumman, and Computer Sciences Corp. In April, Crittercism grew to more than 1 billion monthly users and raised $30 million in Series C funding. Max Lynch, 27, cofounder, Drifty Lynch and his childhood friend and inventing partner-in-crime founded Drifty in 2012. In less than a year, Drifty’s Ionic Framework, software to develop mobile apps in HTML5, has become one of the 50 most popular open-source projects in the world.The company increased its revenue tenfold and became profitable in 2013, after which it raised $1 million in seed funding in 2014. Om Marwah, 25, cognitive scientist, Walmart Labs At Walmart Labs, Marwah is applying his academic background in cognitive science and geography to online marketing. Marwah has given speeches to audiences ranging from academics at UCLA to attendees of the Innovation Summit and World Future Summit. Austin McChord, 29, founder, Datto Do you love your work enough to pass up a 9-figure payday? That’s the question Austin McChord had to answer when an established security firm offered to buy him out (at the time he was the company’s sole shareholder) for more than $100 million. “I said no because there’s more ground for us to cover,” McChord explains. “I loved my job and the people working at the company.” Datto provides emergency back-up and data protection services to large firms who trust it to get them back online – fast. When Hurricane Sandy took down a New York City-area high-frequency trading firm, Datto had them back online in a matter of minutes and it claims it can restore IT-services in a matter of seconds now. That speed and reliability has translated into spectacular growth: the seven-year old firm is profitable, nudging $100 million in sales and has more than 330 employees. Last year, McChord took his first outside funding, $25 million from GeneralCatalyst, looking to tap its expertise and “play for real.” Vinith Misra, 27, research staff member, IBM Watson Group After getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Vinith Misra joined IBM’s Watson Group, working at its Almaden Research Lab to study machine learning, data mining, and natural language processing. One of Vinith’s projects was the Chef Watson machine, which applies artificial intelligence to create new recipes. Dan Pinto, 27, Dmitri Rokhfeld, 27, cofounders, Machinio Based in Chicago, Machinio is a search engine for the mechanical industry—its cofounders call it the “Kayak of used machinery.” In May, the company raised $1 million in seed funding. In the past year alone, more than one million unique buyers have spent tens of millions of dollars on used machinery through Machinio. Georg Polzer, 26, cofounder, Teralytics Polzer’s Zurich company tracks the movements of more than 300 million cell phone users in Europe, US and Asia. The data, scrubbed and anonymized, is sold to to city planners and marketers in search of demographic insights. Kira Radinsky, 28, cofounder, SalesPredict Radinsky used to work at Microsoft Research developing early warning algorithms for global disasters. Now she puts those analytical skills to work as CTO of SalesPredict, a company that uses predictive analytics to help sales teams find the right customers. Vivek Ravisanker, 27, cofounder, HackerRank After graduating from NIT in India, Ravisankar moved to the U.S. and started HackerRank, a service that companies can use to host coding challenges to find new engineering talent. Paying customers include Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, Walmart, and the White House. Medhi Samadi, 29, cofounder, Solvvy Samadi and his fellow Carnegie Mellon computer science Ph.D. Justin Betteridge are using artificial intelligence to produce smarter search results than Google. The two earned $15,000 in investment capital by placing second their school’s 2014 McGinnis Venture Competition, and have also received an undisclosed amount of seed funding. Kyle Vogt, 29, CEO, Cruise Automation After co-founding Justin.tv, Socialcam and Twitch, Vogt now runs Cruise, an automated driving startup that could beat Google’s self-driving cars to market. Cruise’s $10,000 accessory straps to the roof of a car and plugs into the foot well for handsfree driving on freeways. It begins installing in Audi cars in early 2015. Junyu Wang, 29, cofounder, Wandoujia The former user-experience designer at Google is now CEO of Beijing’s Wandoujia, one of China’s biggest online stores for apps and entertainment with more than 350 million installs. In 2014 he raised a remarkable $120 million in an investment round led by Japan’s Softbank. Wandoujia has helped apps like Flipboard, LINE and Evernote launch in China. Yan Zhu, 23, privacy engineer, Yahoo Zhu was hired by Yahoo to help increase security in a post-Snowden age. She previously worked for the EFF, and gained notoriety for attending a mathematics conference where she attempted to dissuade attendees from joining the NSA due to concerns about the agency’s overreach.
In an unlikely next move for career law officer Edward F. Davis, the former Boston police commissioner is joining a tech startup.
Davis will take a board seat with Mark43, a company founded by three Harvard University graduates that has been making big waves in the law enforcement community. Formed out of a class project, the company makes software that provides real-time data analysis of criminal activity and better manages the records police use to keep tabs on suspects.
After piloting the software with a State Police gang unit in Springfield, Mark43 landed its first contract last year with the Los Angeles County Gang Task Force.
“We’re in a really good time across the nation in terms of dropping crime rates, but I still think we’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of technology in police work,” said Davis, who stepped down from the top spot in the Boston Police Department last fall.
Davis is currently on a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and he also recently announced he will be a security analyst for WBZ-TV. He is also considering other consulting work in the area of police technology.
For far too long, Davis said, police departments have not had access to the kind of sophisticated computing tools that companies such as Google or Facebook use to quickly crunch and understand data. In addition to managing department records, Mark43 employs social analytics capabilities that can mine massive amounts of police data to find otherwise unknown ties among gang members or links between criminal suspects.
Similar to the way LinkedIn draws correlations based on users’ backgrounds and business experience, Mark43 makes connections among suspected criminals or gang members based on their histories, arrests, and relationships.
“That’s the exciting part of this,” said Davis. “They’re showing real benefit to investigators. It’s streamlining all the information.”
Despite its Boston origins, Mark43 has not signed on Boston’s police department as a customer. However, the company does expect to announce this spring that another major metropolitan police department will use its software.
Davis met the team behind Mark43 on his first day of civilian life. He was attending an event at the Harvard Innovation Lab, a campus gathering place for startups and entrepreneurs, where the Mark43 team had been working on the software.
“I was excited to hear that they were doing something that was different,” said Davis. Much of the computer software used by urban police is outdated, cumbersome, and expensive, he said.
Indeed, in the tech startup world, few companies are focusing on the public safety industry. And that’s a big opportunity for Mark43, said chief executive Scott Crouch, who graduated from Harvard last year.
Mark43 grew out of a class project in which Crouch and two co-founders worked with the Springfield gang unit. Crouch and the other students were tasked with coming up with a program that could use social analytics so the unit could better understand gang relationships, track them, and dismantle their networks.
“We didn’t know much about law enforcement,” said Crouch. But “the first thing we noticed was that their law enforcement software was awful.”
The project quickly turned into a startup that began gaining attention last spring. First, it won a Harvard University entrepreneurship competition; then it landed a $2 million funding deal led by Spark Capital, a Boston firm know for backing Twitter and other successful technology firms.
“These are the types of guys who would be working at Twitter or Facebook, but they spent a lot of time with the Springfield gang unit,” said Alex Finkelstein, a general partner at Spark Capital. “These guys saw the problem firsthand and wanted to solve it.”
The investment is the first for Spark in law enforcement technology. Finkelstein was finalizing the deal with Mark43 on the same day the company’s founders were graduating from Harvard.
Now based in New York, the founders renamed the company from Nucleik to Mark43 — a reference to the “Iron Man” movie series, where the suit of armor worn by character Tony Stark in “Iron Man 3” was named Mark 42.
“We wanted to go for a cooler feel,” said Crouch. “It’s a reference to superheroes, and we are really trying to serve the first responders.”
This post is originally from the Boston Globe.
Immediately after his team pulled suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of a boat in Watertown, Mass., this past April, Chief Joe Cafarelli of the Revere PD and North Metro SWAT Team had to figure out whether another perpetrator might be inside the vessel, hiding under the tarp.
Airborne thermal imaging suggested that the coast was clear, but officers on the ground didn’t know that, and didn’t have any equipment to help them figure it out on their own. The only way to tell was by actually peeking into the boat — a move that would leave officers in a vulnerable position.
Plenty of technology exists to help law enforcement officers in tricky situations, but the gear is often too bulky and expensive to be practical. That’s starting to change as small start-ups break into the exclusive club of law enforcement and security supply.
Bounce Imaging is one such start-up. The Boston-based company is developing a throwable camera ball, designed for situations just like the one Cafarelli encountered.
Inside its rubberized plastic shell, the ball contains six cameras that provide a 360-degree field of view. It shoots in black-and-white, which is more sensitive than color in poor lighting, and uses near-infrared lamps to provide illumination without revealing the ball to the human eye. An officer with an Android phone or tablet can view the image remotely, without having to enter a potentially hostile situation.
The concept isn’t entirely new: Remington makes a throwable camera ball, but at $5,500 a pop, it can be pricey for municipal budgets. Bounce Imaging, which has just five full-time employees, says that its cameras will cost “less than $1,000” at launch. As production scales up, the company says the price should drop down toward $500.
Cafarelli puts it simply: “I’d rather lose a $500 item than a $5,000 item.”
Lower price points aren’t all that start-ups have to offer. They also tend to think outside the box and take advantage of technologies that old-guard providers are hesitant to employ.
Mark43 is a software company that grew from a 2012 class project at Harvard University. The group’s goal was to improve on the decades-old crime-tracking software used by the Massachusetts State Police. Today, its reporting tools are used in the field in Springfield, Mass., and Los Angeles.
Mark43’s software is decidedly more modern than the clunky, laptop-only database programs most departments use. It works with iOS and Android mobile devices, and analyzes gang data. Users have said it’s a huge time saver, and yes, it’s also cheaper than most law enforcement software.
But if a small team could create a better product in barely a year, why has it taken so long for someone to try something new? For one thing, it’s tough to get new police products and services vetted. For another, small companies have traditionally been seen as a risk.
If an entire department commits to a system, it would be a major setback if the developer went out of business. But Crouch says that backing from Spark Capital, which also invests in Twitter and Foursquare, gave Mark43 a boost.
Both companies are taking unusual steps to gain departments’ trust and understand their needs. Mark43 developers did ride-alongs to serve warrants in areas with gang activity, and Bounce Imaging made changes to its camera ball based on officer feedback.
Dave Young, CCO of Bounce Imaging, says he learned from his contacts that “simplicity is an asset.” Fewer moving parts means fewer things can break, and a simpler interface has a shallower learning curve.
Bounce also utilizes Formlabs 3-D printers to pump out new prototype shells on short notice and at low cost. Such sophisticated technology was simply not accessible to a company of Bounce’s size even two years ago, and it’s having a transformative effect on many hardware start-ups.
It’s too early to say whether these new start-ups signal a widespread change in law-enforcement innovation, or if they’re simply exceptions to the rule of big players and stagnating bureaucracy. But one thing is for sure: Cops are reaping the benefits.
If you’re a fan of Iron Man movies, you will know that it features many new and improved protective suits. The most recent of these, introduced in Iron Man 3, is called Mark 42.
On July 15, a former Hollywood writer and current venture capitalist, Alex Finkelstein, announced that he is among the proud owners of a stake in Mark43, a start-up that plans to deliver law enforcement around the world with even better protection than Mark 42.
Mark43 ties together in one place the functions of at least five antiquated police applications such as a mobile app that police can use to get street-level information and a desktop tool that can analyze reams of data. Mark43 cuts the time it takes to do these police tasks “from five to six hours to 30 to 45 minutes,” according to CEO Scott Crouch in a July 10 interview.
Founded by three members of Harvard College’s class of 2013 — Crouch, Flo Mayr and Matt Polega — Mark43 was the result of a Harvard Engineering 96 class project and was based at Harvard’s Innovation Lab during their senior year.
The three students tagged along with police officers in the Springfield Massachusetts State Police Special Projects Team and watched how they worked on the street, in their squad cars, and back at their desks.
And along with Finkelstein, a partner at Spark Capital that also owns stakes in Twitter and Tumblr, General Catalyst, Lowercase Capital, SV Angel, Launchpad LA, Rough Draft Ventures, HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann, and others ponied up a total of $1.95 million in seed funding for Mark43.
I think the co-founders might have been better off picking Minority Report— the 2002 film in which a Pre-Crime Unit arrests people before they commit their evil deeds — as their Hollywood reference.
That’s because while Finkelstein could not cite how Mark43 had helped Springfield improve its crime statistics, he suggested that Mark43 gave its police Pre-Crime Unit-like powers. Finkelstein pointed out that in a March 2013 Boston Globe article, Springfield State Trooper Stephen Gregorczyk credited Mark43 with giving his colleagues “the ability to stop a shooting before it happens.”
The Globe recounted how Gregorczyk used Mark43 to learn about the locations, law enforcement interactions, and personal connections of a furious local drug dealer bent on revenge after he had been robbed. A quick search of the dealer’s name in Mark 43 gave Gregorczyk “a road map to plot how his team could head off the dealer before something bad happened.”
The Springfield police also cut down how long it took them to process information. By getting a “90% increase in information efficiency,” they can spend the saved time collecting more intelligence and performing more social network analysis.
Crouch, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, was pleased to choose Harvard for his engineering education. As Crouch explained, “I liked the idea that its engineering department had so many great professors, had a small number of students, and was still being shaped. At Harvard, I would not be a” cog in the machine — like MIT or Stanford engineering undergraduates.
Engineering 96 gave Crouch and his co-founders a chance to work closely with the Springfield police and to see first-hand the appalling information systems they used. As Crouch argued, “They have multiple systems built for desktops with 15 to 20 year-old architectures, and they don’t work with each other. And what’s worse, the vendors don’t get police input for their systems designs and they grossly overcharge the police departments.”
Crouch’s team also saw first-hand what it would take to design a system that could fit with the way police actually work. “We saw that police officers always keep their dominant hand on their weapon. So we had to make a mobile app that a right-handed officer could use with his left hand,” said Crouch.
Mark43 wants to solve a societal problem and tap a big market opportunity by delivering a better product at a lower price. “Our EMTs, firefighters, and police are kind, generous people doing important work without the proper tools. There are 800,000 local and state police, 100,000 federal officers, and millions worldwide. Our competitors are charging between $250,000 to $500,000 up-front for an inferior product while we offer a very affordable per officer per month pricing model.”
Finkelstein — who according to a July 12 interview grew up in Martha’s Vineyard, was a VC at Softbank, sold five TV shows to Hollywood, and is a Spark co-founder — took about three weeks to decide to invest in Mark43.
Why so fast? According to Finkelstein, “The founders are young, aggressive, and fearless. They care deeply about law enforcement. A friend who is a narcotics officer in the Boston Police Department gave Mark43 fantastic feedback.”
Finkelstein noted, “My friend said that Mark 43 slashes officers’ 10 hours a week of paperwork, replaces antiquated systems that don’t talk to each other, and lets officers capture and access data via mobile — instead of forcing them to use the laptops bolted down to their dashboards.”
Finkelstein sounds confident in Mark43’s future. As he explained, “It’s a great team and a great product. They really want to change law enforcement. They truly, truly care.”
And Mark43 is hiring to meet growing demand. According to Crouch, “We have software deployed in Massachusetts, California, and more departments across the country are coming onboard in the next few months. There is a ton of inbound interest right now. We have not reached out to a single department yet.”
While its revenue potential is uncertain, Mark43 offers a useful lesson in how to overcome potential customers’ fear of hitching their wagon to a start-up — find customer pain, develop a cure for the pain, and provide a low-risk way for customers to try the product.
Mark43 is the trusted leader in public safety technology, providing a secure, all-in-one platform for agencies to save time, stay compliant, and ensure community safety.
