Harvard Law dropout raises $6M for Blue Voice to build a ‘Harvey for police officers’; plus, Clipto uses AI to search terabytes of video

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0:30place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. David Lawrence was a Harvard Law student when an on-campus shooting involving a police officer sparked intense controversy over police conduct. Realizing that most policing errors occur when officers lack instant access to department rules, Lawrence dropped out to tackle the problem with AI. He teamed up with co-founders Amit Patankar, a former Google engineer, and Michael Grotman, a retired Boston police deputy chief, to launch Blue Voice, a Boston-based AI startup that provides real-time policy guidance to officers in the field.

1:14Three years later, Blue Voice is coming out of stealth with$6 million in funding led by SignalFire and Los Olos VC. Officers at 225 county agencies across 25 states now rely on the tool daily to ensure their actions follow department protocol, a platform Lawrence likens to Harvey, the AI tool widely used by lawyers, or Open Evidence, which is a similar tool for doctors. He said, when an officer makes a decision, they do so from memory or best guess, based on thousands of pages of law, policy, municipal ordinances and state laws that they've internalized and kept in their head. Before Blue Voice, an officer who could not recall a specific protocol, like the exact seventh step required at a crime scene, had few good options.

2:08Flip through a 15 ,000-page manual, wake up a supervisor in the middle of the night, or search generic tools like Google or ChatGPT that lack police-specific training. The problem was that traditional methods took too much time, while consumer AI models delivered incorrect answers up to 30 % of the time. Blue Voice says it solves that issue because it is trained on department-specific laws, local ordinances, protocols, and guidelines that general-purpose AI tools can't access on the public internet. The platform also gives officers instant access to detailed school maps on their phones during active shooter emergencies.

2:51Now, Blue Voice answers a question every minute. Lawrence says that officers feel confident relying on the tool because it always points them directly to original regulations, rather than just generating an answer on its own the way ChatGPT would. Rather than dictating actions, the tool simply provides the laws, leaving the final decision to the officers, who combine it with their own field experience. Over the last year, Lawrence says Blue Voice grew its customer base 11-fold because police departments see concrete results, including reduced crime and fewer operational controversies. Blue Voice recently helped prevent a kidnapping after a rookie officer spotted a man pressuring a young girl to enter his vehicle.

3:35Unsure whether he had legal grounds to intervene, the officer consulted Blue Voice on his phone. The app instantly confirmed that the situation met the legal criteria for child enticement, an offense covering attempts to lure a minor for the purpose of committing a crime against them, giving him the immediate authority to act. In another instance, Blue Voice reminded a department chief that he couldn't return an officer to active duty following a shooting without first obtaining a third-party mental health evaluation. The startup, which competes with PE-backed Lexapol, also recently developed functionality to help detectives solve cold cases.

4:15At a time when police use of AI, such as Flock Safety's license plate surveillance systems, draws growing criticism, Lawrence hopes Blue Voice proves that properly deployed AI can deliver public safety benefits without sacrificing civil rights. Lawrence, who previously worked for Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, developed a passion for public service and says he has no regrets about leaving law school behind. He added, this is the best thing I could do with my career and the most impact I could potentially make.

4:50Generative AI is making it easier to produce more content and harder to keep track of it. As videos, recordings, and documents accumulate, Adobe, Apple, Google, and a growing number of startups are using AI to make those files searchable. It is not yet clear whether that will support a new category of standalone software or become a standard feature of products people already use. Clipto is betting there is room for a separate product. The San Francisco headquartered startup, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised$15 million in an all-equity round at a$250 million post-money valuation.

5:33The investors include HSG, which is formerly Sequoia, China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files on a user's computer. Instead of scrolling through folders to find what you need, users can search by describing what they're looking for, or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for them. Clipto founder Henry Kong has been working on related problems for roughly two decades. Kong said that while a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University back in 2006, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them.

6:20Kong later applied the same basic idea to his first startup, which used AI to keep track of the clothes in a user's closet and suggest outfits. His second company, Zen Video, focused on making video creation easier and was acquired by Tencent back in 2020. He said, the real insight is that in this AI era, we don't have a content shortage. The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that is not being used. Kong founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup's founding team, building the company around that observation.

7:01While other AI companies focused on generating new material, Clipto set out to help users find and reuse files they already had. Clipto initially built its product for video creators, trying to manage footage scattered across computers and external drives. But Kong said creators now make up only about a quarter to one-third of its users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human resources professionals, professors, and students. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kong declined to provide a more precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, though he said a significant portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years.

7:50Clipto reached$15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net income basis. The company has just over 20 employees split among the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard that allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information. Kong said access to indexed files requires the user's active request and authorization. When an AI application accesses Clipto's indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies.

8:31All of this processing runs locally on the user's device without requiring cloud services. Clipto is entering a market where larger companies already control much of the data and software people use to manage it. Adobe already offers AI-powered search and Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos allow users to find photos and videos using natural language descriptions. Kong said Clipto can search across videos, audio, images, and documents, while products from Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on files stored within their own services. Clipto also lets users make selected information available to AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Claude.

9:16The company is betting that combining those functions in one product will help it compete with larger platforms. The new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with more AI agents. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to techcrunch.com.

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