Village Defense

Village Defense operates as a community-focused public safety platform, offering a software solution that alerts users to criminal activity in their vicinity through real-time, crowdsourced updates. The company was founded by Sharath Mekala and Nathan Black. Mekala's motivation to start the company stemmed from a personal experience with a series of break-ins in his neighborhood, where a lack of community communication was evident. His background includes a decade of community organizing in Atlanta and serving as the Vice President of Atlanta's Planning Advisory Board, experiences that informed his approach to building safer neighborhoods.

The core of the business is a mobile application that functions as a community-driven safety network. When a user witnesses a crime, they can send an alert through the app, which instantly notifies other registered users and neighbors via text message or phone call. This system aims to amplify the number of witnesses and provide law enforcement with more information. The platform uses geolocation to provide relevant alerts to users as they move, and it includes a feature named Sonya, a crimebot that allows users to search for police data. The app also facilitates real-time chat among neighbors to share updates, photos, and other relevant information during an incident.

Village Defense employs a freemium business model. It offers a free version of the app for individual users to send and receive real-time alerts. Revenue is generated through a premium subscription service targeted at homeowners associations, which was priced at $125 a month. The company has also explored opportunities to market its platform to government entities such as the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Education Department. Village Defense went through the 1776 startup incubator and has raised over $600,000 in venture capital from investors including 500 Startups and Extrenext Ventures. By 2017, the platform had expanded to over 3,000 neighborhoods across 300 cities.

Keywords: public safety, neighborhood watch, crime alerts, community safety, geolocation alerts, real-time notifications, crowdsourced safety, mobile security app, homeowner association services, law enforcement support, public safety platform, Sharath Mekala, community policing, crime reporting, emergency alerts, personal safety, neighborhood security network, safety map, crime data, witness amplification