An organization that claims its technology can “revolutionize” emergency services has raised $27 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The company, Preparedallows 911 dispatchers to get a caller's real-time GPS location if their phone supports it. Through Prepared, dispatchers may also receive and reply to texts and pictures and, on iPhones with Apple's Emergency SOS Live Video feature, take a video call.
Michael Chime, co-founder and CEO of Prepared, claims that the platform can provide operators with helpful context that they might not otherwise have.
“The goal of our technology is to scale back the burden of every individual call in order that emergency response can move faster,” Chime told TechCrunch. “If we are able to shave even a couple of seconds off a selected emergency call, we wish to try this.”
Across the country, many 911 centers are tied to landlines, have difficulty locating callers and are unable to reply calls SMS or photos. This is despite a two-decade-old effort, Next Generation 911 (NG911), to modernize the greater than 5,500 emergency call centers within the United States
NG911 is web based and able to receiving multimedia and more accurate caller information. However, deployments have only reached about 56.2% of the US, after to the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
Launched in 2019 by Chime, Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni, Prepared initially focused on a single style of emergency response: school shootings. The trio, who grew up near the sites of devastating school shootings, including Sandy Hook Elementary School, left Yale together to develop a public safety app for college administrators.
A yr later, Chime, Gleicher and Soni realized there was a bigger customer segment – 911 call centers – that may benefit from Prepared's technology. So they modified the corporate.
Today, Prepared offers a web-based platform that shows dispatchers a running transcript of calls. It uses AI to pick potentially essential information like addresses and descriptions of emergencies, and even translate texts for dispatchers if essential.
Prepared recently launched a tool that permits dispatchers to speak with a Spanish speaker using an AI-generated voice. Prepared transcribes and translates the dispatcher's speech after which reads the interpretation aloud over the phone; Chime claims this will reduce the necessity to conference with an outdoor translator, which is typical with callers who don't speak English.
“Given the growing non-English speaking population, particularly in larger cities, this was a high-priority request from agencies,” he added, “who otherwise depend on language translators who can sometimes take several minutes to reply to a request join a call.” .”
Minutes saved during an emergency response could make a difference. After U.S. regulators say cutting 911 response times by only one minute could save 1000’s of lives annually.
But AI translation and Prepared's other AI-powered features also include risks. AI often gets summaries mistaken. And some speakers' speech has been found to be transcribed more accurately than others. A current one study showed that speech recognition systems from leading technology firms were twice as more likely to mistranscribe audio from black speakers than from white speakers.
Chime notes that Prepared's AI features are optional – the corporate's video, GPS location and SMS features are free for emergency responders. But he also argues that AI overall will help dispatchers handle calls more quickly and accurately.
“We are pioneering the usage of AI in public safety to synthesize data and make it actionable,” he said. “With Prepared’s Summarizer, dispatchers can read short, AI-generated summaries of incidents as a substitute of listening to call logs or reading long notes. And we consider our translation feature will prove critical in improving accessibility for Spanish speakers while improving response times for Spanish-speaking calls.”
Prepared, which has contracts with nearly 1,000 public safety agencies in 49 states, plans to place the Series B money into product research and development and go-to-market efforts. Prepared may also increase hiring, with the goal of adding 20 recent employees to its 50-person workforce in New York by the tip of the yr.
“We are only starting to surface relating to the potential to unlock essential citizen data,” Chime said. “We are moving toward a world where Prepared as a platform connects and optimizes the end-to-end workflow, from the second a call is available in to the moment a field representative is on site.”
First Round Capital, M13 and undisclosed angel investors also participated in Prepared's Series B, bringing the corporate's total raise to $57 million.
