A company that claims its technology can “revolutionize” emergency calling has raised $27 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The company, Preparedallows 911 operators to get the real-time GPS location of the caller if their phone supports it. Through Prepared, operators can also receive and respond to text and picture messages, and on iPhones with Apple's GPS location feature, SOS emergency Live video function: Answer a video call.
Prepared co-founder and CEO Michael Chime says the platform can offer traders valuable context they might not otherwise have.
“The goal of our technology is to reduce the burden of each individual call so that emergency response can move faster,” Chime told TechCrunch. “If we can shave even a few seconds off a 911 call, we want to do that.”
Nationwide, several 911 centers are connected to landlines, have difficulty locating callers and are unable to process calls. Text message or photographs. This is despite a two-decade-old effort, Next Generation 911 (NG911), to modernize the United States’ more than 5,500 emergency call centers.
The NG911 is Internet-based and is capable of receiving multimedia and caller information more accurately. However, deployments have only reached about 56.2% of the U.S. according to the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
Prepared, launched by Chime, Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni in 2019, initially focused on a single type of emergency response: school shootings. The trio, who grew up near the sites of devastating school shootings including Sandy Hook Elementary School, dropped out of Yale University to build a public safety app for school administrators.
A year later, Chime, Gleicher and Soni realized there was a larger customer segment (911 call centers) that could benefit from Prepared’s technology, so they restructured the company.
Prepared currently offers a web-based platform that shows dispatchers a transcript of calls. It uses artificial intelligence to extract potentially important elements, such as addresses and emergency descriptions, and even translates texts for dispatchers when necessary.
Recently, Prepared launched a tool that allows operators to chat with a Spanish speaker using an AI-generated voice. Prepared transcribes and translates the operator’s speech and then reads the translation aloud over the phone. Chime claims this can reduce the need to have a conference call with an outside translator, which is the typical procedure with non-English speaking callers.
“With an increasing non-English speaking population, especially in larger cities, this has been a high priority request from agencies,” she added. “Who otherwise rely on language translators who can sometimes take several minutes to join a call after a request.”
Minutes saved in an emergency response could make all the difference. According U.S. regulators say thousands of lives could be saved each year if 911 response times were cut by just one minute.
But AI translation and other AI-powered Prepared features also come with risks. AI is often… is wrong in the summaries. And it has been found to transcribe the speech of some speakers more accurately than others. A recent study study It showed that speech recognition systems from major tech companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from black speakers compared to white speakers.
Chime notes that Prepared’s AI features are optional — the company’s video, GPS location and text messaging capabilities are free for emergency centers. But it also argues that, overall, AI can help dispatchers process calls more quickly and accurately.
“We’ve been pioneers in using AI in public safety to synthesize data and make it actionable,” he said. “Prepared’s summarizer allows dispatchers to read brief AI-generated incident summaries instead of listening to minutes of call audio or reading lengthy notes. And we believe our translation feature will prove crucial to improving accessibility for Spanish speakers while also improving response times for Spanish-language calls.”
Prepared, which has agreements with nearly 1,000 public safety agencies in 49 states, plans to put the Series B money toward product research and development and go-to-market initiatives. Prepared will also ramp up hiring, aiming to add 20 employees to its 50-person New York-based staff by the end of the year.
“We’ve only just begun to explore the possibility of accessing critical citizen data,” Chime said. “We’re moving toward a world where Prepared, as a platform, connects and streamlines the end-to-end workflow from the moment a call is received until a first responder arrives on the scene.”
First Round Capital, M13 and undisclosed angel investors also participated in Prepared’s Series B. This brings the total raised by the company to $57 million.
