Prepared, which wants to ‘revolutionize’ emergency 911 calls, raises $27M

A company that claims its tech can “revolutionize” emergency calls has raised $27 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The company, Prepared, enables 911 dispatchers to get a caller’s real-time GPS location if their phone supports it. Via Prepared, dispatchers can also receive and respond to texts and images, and — on iPhones with Apple’s Emergency SOS Live Video feature — answer a video call.

Prepared co-founder and CEO Michael Chime claims that the platform can give operators valuable context they wouldn’t 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 save even a few seconds on a given 911 call, we want to do that.”

Nationwide, a number of 911 centers are landline-bound, struggle to locate callers, and can’t process SMS or photos. That’s despite a two-decades-old effort, Next Generation 911 (NG911), to modernize the more than 5,500 emergency call centers in the U.S.

NG911 is internet-based, and capable of receiving multimedia and more accurate caller info. However, deployments have only reached about 56.2% of the U.S., according to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

Launched by Chime, Dylan Gleicher, and Neal Soni in 2019, Prepared 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, dropped out of Yale together to build a public safety app for school administrators.

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A year in, Chime, Gleicher, and Soni realized there was a larger customer segment — 911 call centers — that could benefit from Prepared’s tech. So they pivoted the company.

Today, Prepared offers a web-based platform that shows dispatchers a running transcript of calls. It uses AI to pull out potential items of importance, like addresses and descriptions of emergencies, even translating texts for dispatchers where necessary.

Prepared recently launched a tool that lets dispatchers chat with a Spanish speaker using an AI-generated voice. Prepared transcribes and translates the dispatcher’s speech, and then reads the translation aloud over the phone; Chime claims that this can reduce the need to conference with a third-party translator, which is the typical procedure with non-English callers.

“With a growing non-English speaking population, especially in larger cities, this has been a high-priority request from agencies,” he added, “which otherwise depend on language translators that can sometimes take several minutes to join a call after a request.”

Minutes shaved off an emergency response could make a difference. According to U.S. regulators, thousands of lives could be saved each year by reducing 911 response times by just a minute.

But AI translation and Prepared’s other AI-powered features also come with risks. AI often gets summaries wrong. And it’s been found to transcribe speech from some speakers more accurately than others. One recent study showed that speech recognition systems from leading 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 texting capabilities are free for 911 centers. But he also argues that, on the whole, AI can help process dispatcher calls faster and more accurately.

“We have pioneered the use of AI in public safety to synthesize data and make it actionable,” he said. “Prepared’s summarizer allows dispatchers to read short AI-generated summaries of incidents rather than listening to minutes of call audio or reading lengthy notes. And we believe that our translation feature will prove crucial in enhancing accessibility for Spanish speakers while simultaneously improving response times for Spanish-speaking calls.”

Prepared, which has deals with close to 1,000 public safety agencies across 49 states, plans to put the cash from the Series B toward product R&D and go-to-market efforts. Prepared will also step up hiring, with the goal of adding 20 staffers to its 50-person, New York-based workforce by the end of the year.

“We’ve only just tapped the surface when it comes to the potential of unlocking critical citizen data,” Chime said. “We’re moving toward a world where Prepared as a platform connects and optimizes the end-to-end workflow from the second a call comes in to when a field responder is on scene.”

First Round Capital, M13, and undisclosed angel investors also participated in Prepared’s Series B. It brings the company’s total raised to $57 million.