Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine’s Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph

Core Mission and Philosophy

• Peregrine's objective is to leverage technology to create safety, stability, and prosperity within cities, counties, and states without creating a surveillance state.
• The company operates on the premise that objective safety and the feeling of safety are foundational prerequisites for communities to thrive.
• The organization aims to establish a "backbone infrastructure" for modern cities that preserves individual privacy while fostering collective intelligence.
• Founders Nick and Ben explicitly reject the "surveillance state" model, positioning Peregrine as a defender of civil liberties and local data sovereignty.
• The company's cultural ethos is built on "forward-deployed engineering," which involves owning customer outcomes with 3x to 5x speed efficiency while maintaining deep empathy for the customer's institutional context.

Business Model and Data Governance

• Peregrine inverts the traditional data collection business model by refusing to store or aggregate customer data; instead, it connects pre-existing, disparate data sources while keeping ownership entirely with the local institution.
• The company prioritizes local intelligence, ensuring all data remains locked down at the municipal level to prevent the creation of a centralized "panopticon."
• Structural integrity is maintained through rigorous permission controls, data governance, and sovereignty frameworks that allow institutions to share specific data points securely without oversharing.
• The organization explicitly targets "underdog" customers (municipal and county levels) rather than large federal entities, aiming to solve problems previously considered too complex or expensive for these budgets.
• Data preparation and integration constitute the vast majority of engineering effort (estimated at 95%), focusing on ensuring accuracy and governance before any AI interaction occurs.

Technology and AI Applications

• The platform utilizes agentic AI to automate the tedious, long-horizon work of data integration, with 90% of integration code currently written by AI agents under human oversight.
• Specific use cases include a "cold case agent" capable of processing 200–300 GB of unstructured evidence (video, audio, images, PDFs) in 30–60 minutes to identify patterns previously missed by human analysts.
• In Florida, AI analysis of weather and terrain data uncovered a specific pattern of three consecutive days of weather creating sand channels and rip currents, explaining a spike in over 100 water rescues.
• In a Florida county case, the system enabled a detective to semantically identify a pattern of anti-Semitic threats against synagogues, a task that was previously impossible with keyword searches.
• The platform enables "rapid innovation cycles" where deployment strategists can build custom software (e.g., hurricane simulators, fire deployment impact models) using AI-generated code to solve specific local problems.
• Peregrine is building a "institutional memory layer" for cities, designed to outlast political administrations by preserving the operational knowledge of local governments.

Leadership and Culture

• Nick Benes led Palantir's Special Operations Center of Excellence (SOCOM), deploying into high-stakes intelligence operations in the Middle East before co-founding Peregrine.
• Ben Hallowell previously worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Sudan and Colombia, and Damagi in rural India on tuberculosis drug adherence, experiences that shaped his thesis on data-driven humanitarian impact.
• The founding team began in 2017, incorporating in 2018, and secured their first client (San Pablo Police Department) on February 26, 2018, after overcoming over 24 rejections from other departments.
• The company maintained operations through the "Defund the Police" era and the 2020 pandemic protests, holding the tension between supporting law enforcement and respecting community concerns.
• Peregrine's engineering culture treats forward-deployed engineers not as cost centers but as R&D teams that generate product primitives and "innovation lab" projects directly from customer environments.

Stance on Specific Technologies

• Peregrine refuses to impose universal policies on facial recognition; instead, they support agencies in understanding legal and contextual implications to make their own sovereign decisions.
• The company acknowledges that most public safety agencies currently choose not to implement facial recognition, aligning their tooling to support whatever decision the local community and law leadership dictate.
• The firm explicitly avoids "network effects" strategies that rely on aggregating data across clients, viewing the preservation of data sanctity and local ownership as a moral imperative.

Future Outlook and Scalability

• The founders aim to expand from a few clients to supporting 10,000 cities over the next decade, viewing this as an "infrastructure" mission rather than a software product rollout.
• The cost of delivery has been reduced by an order of magnitude to below $1 million per year, making high-quality, tailored technology accessible to municipalities that previously could not afford it.
• The company plans to continue deep, hands-on engagement with customers to ensure the technology adapts to unique local needs rather than forcing a standardized solution.
• The long-term vision is to empower 10,000 unique cities to become "more awesome" in their specific contexts by providing them with an institutional memory layer and secure data infrastructure.