Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine’s Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph
In a Nutshell
Peregrine builds AI infrastructure for public safety agencies that joins existing data sources instead of collecting new data, emphasizing customer data ownership, strict governance controls, and privacy preservation over surveillance models. The company operates through forward-deployed engineers who embed with police, fire, and emergency departments to solve their specific operational problems, rejecting Silicon Valley's "move fast" approach in favor of deep institutional understanding and patient relationship-building. Their core strategy focuses on creating an institutional memory layer for cities by turning massive unstructured datasets (like cold case files) into actionable intelligence through specialized agents, while deliberately avoiding network effects that would centralize sensitive community data.
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Peregrine is built around leveraging technology to work with cities, counties, and states to impact the places people live. At the bottom of the pyramid for making cities awesome is the idea of safety - people need objective safety and need to feel safe. When that stability is there, amazing things become possible. The company aims to create backbone infrastructure at the modern city level to help preserve individuality and privacy while also bringing people together.
Peregrine is building AI that protects cities and communities while rejecting the surveillance state. The company focuses on forward deployed engineering, civil liberties, and public safety applications.
Nick Noone ran Palantir's SOCOM unit and deployed into dangerous high stakes intelligence operations in the Middle East. Forward deployed engineering means psychologically going in and owning or co-owning the customer's problem. The goal is getting all the way to the outcome with and on behalf of customers. Technology and skills are part of the answer, but the real answer is getting to the outcome at all costs, ideally three to five times faster than any other person or team could do. At the end of the day, it's the customer's win, not the company's win.
When building Peregrine, the forward deployed engineering concept had been around for a while. Feedback indicated that when really smart people from top five or top ten schools would go into complicated places like the LAPD and quickly try to understand 30 years of institutional context - not just at the data level but at the human level - the idea that moving fast is even possible in that environment is very counterintuitive to the customer. This often shows up as ego to organizations where people have dedicated their entire lives to particular roles. Silicon Valley misses that letting go of intelligence, skills, and abilities, suspending ego, and really getting into the customer's context requires high empathy and patient ways of working.
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