Rekor Systems
A publicly traded ALPR vendor (Nasdaq: REKR) with a genuinely unusual origin story compared to Flock or Axon: it wasn’t founded to build license plate readers at all. It began as a 2017 merger of two unrelated small public companies into a “holding company for professional services firms,” and only became an ALPR company in 2019 by acquiring a startup called OpenALPR — after which it literally renamed itself around the acquisition. Named alongside Flock Safety and Motorola/Vigilant as one of three vendors explicitly authorized in a Sheriff’s Office ALPR policy already cited elsewhere on this site.
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Matt Hill founds OpenALPR in Boston
OpenALPR Technology, Inc. was organized as an S Corporation in the state of Florida on June 5, 2015 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, per its own audited financial statements later filed with the SEC as part of Rekor’s acquisition disclosure. The company was founded by Matt Hill, an engineer who had previously worked at Riverbed Technology and OPNET Technologies; Hill led OpenALPR as an independent company for nearly four years before it was acquired in 2019 (below), at which point he became Rekor’s Chief Science Officer — a role he still holds. This entry’s founder attribution is sourced to secondary business-profile coverage (Bloomberg, Equilar, MarketScreener bios), not independently confirmed against a primary OpenALPR-era document — flagged honestly rather than presented as SEC-sourced fact.
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Novume acquires OpenALPR — and becomes an ALPR company for the first time
Novume’s subsidiary Rekor Recognition Systems, Inc. completed the purchase of OpenALPR’s assets, restructured down from an original $15,000,000 Base Purchase Price to $7,000,000 in cash, subject to adjustment, plus 600,000 shares of Rekor common stock (stated value $5/share) and a $5,000,000 promissory note, due March 11, 2021, bearing 16% interest, with an accompanying five-year warrant for 625,000 shares at $0.74/share. This is the acquisition that turned a generic professional-services holding company into an ALPR vendor — before this, Novume/KeyStone/Brekford had no automated license plate reader product of its own.
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Novume Solutions renames itself Rekor Systems, moves to Nasdaq as REKR
Seven weeks after acquiring OpenALPR, the company completed its name change from Novume Solutions, Inc. to Rekor Systems, Inc., beginning to trade on Nasdaq under the new symbol REKR — the company’s own announcement said the rename was meant “to further align the company with its current focus” on ALPR and vehicle recognition, with the board separately approving a review of any remaining business lines “not core to the ALPR industry” for divestiture. In other words: the acquisition came first, the identity as an ALPR company came after.
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Motorola's Vigilant Solutions sues Rekor over a patent — settled confidentially nine months later
Vigilant Solutions, LLC, a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions, Inc., filed a complaint on February 21, 2020 against the Company and certain of its subsidiaries in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, alleging certain Rekor products infringed a Vigilant patent — one of the few documented instances of two major ALPR vendors on this site suing each other directly, rather than a city or a privacy advocate suing either of them. Rekor denied the claims, and both sides fought over the underlying patent’s validity at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office before Rekor and Vigilant agreed to resolve the district court litigation and intellectual property rights action pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement in November 2020. Rekor’s own SEC filing states the settlement had no material effect on the company — its own characterization; the settlement terms themselves were never made public.
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