Latest edition: 24 September 2026London — published continuously since 2026Free forever
The Founder Gazette
Startup news, held to newspaper standards
Startup news

Flock Safety offers buyouts to all 1,500 staff, deadline 2 October

The licence plate camera company, valued at $8bn, has put a voluntary exit package in front of every employee as cities cancel contracts.

By The Gazette desk23 September 2026264

Flock Safety has offered a buyout to all 1,500 of its employees. Staff have until 2 October to decide.

The package includes healthcare and stock options, according to reporting on the offer. The company has described it as its most generous.

The sums have not been disclosed. The offer may run to tens of thousands of dollars per employee, on the account of the reporting.

Flock sells automatic licence plate reading cameras, largely to police forces and local government. It was last valued at $8bn.

That customer base is the problem. A growing number of cities and towns have cancelled or declined to renew contracts for the cameras.

Continue reading № 264
Practice

Lumox kept its WebGL site and added 41 crawlable pages

266 · 24 September 2026
Founder tips

Sort the job into four buckets before you approve the hire

265 · 23 September 2026

The Saturday Edition

One email, Saturday morning. A round-up of the week, perfect to go with your cup of coffee.

Energy costs

Ineos halts three Hull plants over 12x US gas prices

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has mothballed Ineos Acetyls' Humberside site, affecting up to 1,000 staff. UK wholesale gas has almost doubled since July, and the bill lands on anyone running energy-hungry operations here.

261 · 23 September 2026

Tampa solo founder builds AI research platform that exposes when AI models disagree

MelMat asks eight AI models the same question and prints where they disagree. One recent brief came back with 51% consensus, which is rather the point.

260 · 23 September 2026

Waste operators face 1 October digital tracking deadline

Digital waste tracking becomes mandatory for permitted waste receivers in England and Wales on 1 October, with Scotland following in January 2027. A Strathaven software founder says the hard part is the sites with no mobile signal.

259 · 22 September 2026
Founder story

School-run fumes led to a $50m electric bus business

Duncan McIntyre noticed a bus tailpipe level with his son's face. Eight years on, Highland Electric Fleets runs buses in more than 100 US cities and, on the company's figures, turns over $45m to $50m a year.

262 · 23 September 2026
Founder story

Protein-bite brand started at 60 reaches $2m and 13,000 shops

Theresa Burnley spent 16 years making other people's food. She started Circ in 2023 as a side project and now sells through Starbucks and Walmart.

241 · 15 September 2026
Founder profile

Doctor's hiring platform makes hospitals apply to nurses

Iman Abuzeid qualified as a doctor in London and never practised. Nine years after founding Incredible Health, she says an AI interviewer has cut hiring time by 30%.

227 · 12 September 2026
Tools

A calculator for when a local LLM rig pays for itself

Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and a daily token count, and works out how long the hardware takes to beat renting the same model by the token.

256 · 21 September 2026
Startup tips

Harvey puts a lawyer in every deployment. About 180 of them

The legal AI company staffs former practising attorneys onto every customer rollout, at a posted $220,000 to $320,000 OTE. Here is what that buys and what it replaces.

244 · 16 September 2026
Media relations

Pitching a Substack writer: skip the subscriber count

Ashley Waters of PAN sets out how newsletter inboxes differ from newsrooms. One mass message through Substack's own system can cost a founder access to the whole platform.

242 · 15 September 2026