Mark43 CFO Chris Merwin Charts Public Safety Tech Path After Two Decades in Finance

Chris Merwin has spent his career in the peculiar intersection of enterprise software and government procurement—a space where "move fast and break things" meets "please submit your proposal in triplicate." Now, as CFO of Mark43, a public safety technology company, he's navigating one of the more interesting questions in B2G software: how do you build financial infrastructure for a company selling to customers who literally cannot go out of business?

Mark43 provides cloud-based software for law enforcement agencies—the systems that manage everything from dispatch to evidence tracking. It's the kind of unglamorous but critical infrastructure that finance leaders rarely think about until something goes catastrophically wrong. (Think: "Why can't the police department access their own records?" followed by a very uncomfortable city council meeting.)

Merwin's background makes him unusually suited for this particular flavor of chaos. Public safety tech sits at a weird crossroads: it's enterprise SaaS, but your customers are municipalities with budget cycles that make corporate procurement look nimble. It's mission-critical software, but you're selling to agencies that often run on systems built during the Clinton administration. And it's a growth market—everyone agrees police departments need better technology—but the sales cycles are measured in fiscal years, not quarters.

Here's the thing everyone misses about B2G software finance: the revenue recognition is actually the easy part. It's the forecasting that'll make you want to quit and become a park ranger. A city council can approve your deal in June, then discover they need three more committee votes in September, then pause everything because there's a mayoral election in November. Meanwhile, your board is asking why Q3 looks soft, and you're explaining that the customer definitely wants the software, they're just... democratically deliberating about it.

(This is why B2G CFOs develop a particular thousand-yard stare when asked about pipeline conversion rates.)

The public safety market also presents a fascinating financial modeling challenge: your customers have effectively infinite lifetime value—police departments aren't going anywhere—but they also have effectively zero ability to increase spending without voter approval. So you're building a business model around customers who will definitely renew forever but might take eighteen months to approve a 10% price increase.

What makes Merwin's role particularly interesting right now is that public safety tech is having a moment. Not the splashy, venture-capital-throwing-money-at-anything moment, but the quieter "wait, our critical infrastructure is running on software from 2003" moment that actually leads to budget allocations. Cities are discovering that modern police work requires modern data systems, and that revelation is creating opportunities for companies like Mark43 that can actually navigate government procurement.

The question for Merwin—and for anyone financing B2G software—is whether you can build a financial model that satisfies both the patient capital required for government sales cycles and the growth expectations of a venture-backed company. It's not impossible (Palantir eventually figured it out, though "eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence), but it requires a CFO who understands that "closing the quarter" sometimes means "the city council meets next Thursday, so we'll know by Friday, probably, unless there's a snowstorm."

Which is to say: public safety tech needs financial leaders who can translate between the world of municipal budgets and the world of investor expectations. Based on his track record, Merwin seems to speak both languages. Whether that's enough to make the unit economics work is the more interesting question—and one that every B2G CFO is trying to answer right now.