Public safety startup Prepared, which uses AI to assist first responders in 911 centers, raised $27 million in a Series B funding round for its platform.
Its latest round of funding was led by investors Andreesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, M13, and NewView Capita, and brought the company’s funding raised to nearly $60 million.
Headquartered in New York, Prepared aims to empower emergency response systems to ultimately “save lives.” The platform equips 911 centers and first responders in the field with AI-powered assistive technology; tools like real-time translation and transcription services, advanced speech processing, precise location data for incoming calls, and more are used to improve the response rate of operators, dispatchers, and field teams.
Currently, Prepared is employed by call centers covering more than 20% of the U.S. population, according to a Forbes report.
In addition to allowing the 911 callers to share videos, photos and sounds with emergency responders in real time, the public safety platform features two-way audio and text translation. Prepared recognizes audio in 33 languages and text in more than 140 languages, and can translate 911 audio transcripts into more than 30 languages.
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“Today, 911 call takers must conference a third-party translator and wait for them to join, which wastes precious time during an emergency,” according to their press release. With the integration of Prepared’s new technology, the caller will be responded to in their own language through an AI-generated voice feature, saving valuable time on non-English 911 calls.
Founded by three Yale graduates in 2019 – Dylan Gleicher, Michael Chime, and Indian American Neal Soni – Prepared was born out of their collective experience of growing up near sites of school shootings and wondering if there was a better way to keep students safe. Nearly 150 U.S. schools are already equipped with the AI-based public safety technology.
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Soni, who received the Milton Fisher Scholarship for Innovation and Creativity and the prestigious Miller Prize cash grant for Top Tech Startup during his time at Yale, is the Chief Product Officer at Prepared. All three founders have been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2024 list.
“My favorite part of working in public safety is how grateful the 911 operators are for our software,” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “Within days of us onboarding a new 911 center, they use Prepared to help save a life — from giving corrective CPR on 911 calls using live video… to communicating with a non-English caller using our AI assistant. The 911 operators always take the time to tell us these amazing stories about how Prepared helped save a life, and thank us for our work. These stories get me excited to go to work every day.”