Every day,
there are around 650,000 emergency service callouts via 911 for medical, police
and fire assistance in the U.S.; and by their nature these are some of the most
urgent communications that we will ever make.
But
ironically for the age of smartphones, connected things and the internet, these
911 calls are also some of the most antiquated — with a typical emergency
response center still relying on humans making the calls to tell them the most
basic of information about their predicaments before anything can be actioned.
Now a new
generation of startups has been emerging to tackle that gap to make emergency
responses more accurate and faster; and one of them today is announcing a
significant round of funding on the back of very strong growth. RapidSOS, a New
York-based startup that helps increase the funnel of information that is
transmitted to emergency services alongside a call for help, has raised another
$30 million in funding — money that it’s going to use to continue enhancing its
product, and also to start pushing into more international markets.
The
opportunity internationally is greater than the U.S. alone: while the U.S. sees
240 million calls per year to 911 numbers, globally the figure is 2 billion.
The funding
— which comes only about six months after RapidSOS’s
href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rapidsos-raises-16m-to-provide-life-saving-data-to-first-responders-300631998.html">last
round of $16 million — is being led by Playground Global, the VC firm and
“startup studio” co-founded by Android co-creator Andy Rubin.
Others in
the round include a mix of previous and new investors (and a lot of illustrious
names): Highland Capital Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Two Sigma
Ventures, Forte Ventures, The Westly Group, CSAA IG, three former FCC chairmen
and Ralph de la Vega, the former AT&T vice chairman and CEO of AT&T
Business Solutions and International. It brings the total raised by the startup
to $65 million.
Michael
Martin, CEO and co-founder of RapidSOS, said the startup is not disclosing its
valuation, but he did point me to the company’s stunning growth over the last
year. “We went from 10,000 users to 250 million,” he said, noting the range of
agencies and other partners the startup is integrating with to provide more
detailed information across the emergency services ecosystem.
Partners on
the two sides of RapidSOS’s marketplace include, on one side, Apple, Google,
Uber, car companies and others making connected devices and apps — which
integrate RapidSOS’s technology to provide 911 response centers with more data
such as a user’s location and diagnostic details that can help determine what
kind of response is needed, where to go, and so on. And on the other side, you
have the emergency services that need that information to do their work and
organize assistance.
RapidSOS
offers a few different products to the market. Its most popular, the RapidSOS
NG911 Clearinghouse, works either with a response center’s existing software,
or by way of a web application. This product now covers some 180 million people
in the U.S. in terms of the number of people touched by those different
emergency response services, the company says.
The RapidSOS
API, meanwhile, is used by a number of device makers and apps to be able to
channel that information into the RapidSOS system, so that when a response
center is using RapidSOS and a caller is using a device or app with the API
integrated with it, that information gets conveyed.
The startup
also offers a rescue and recovery app called Haven, and found its profile
getting a huge boost after Haven went viral in the wake of a succession of
natural disasters in the U.S.
The company
generates revenue in different ways across that range of services. On mobile,
the service is free to consumers, with licensing for the integrations paid for
by large tech partners like Apple, Google, etc. In the areas of safety and
security (including integrations with home security, digital health, medical
alert, personal emergency response (PERS) and vehicle crash response
providers), RapidSOS is “typically bundled in with the service offering,”
Martin said.
Martin — who
co-founded the company with now-CTO Nicholas Horelik (respectively Harvard and
MIT grads) after Martin said he was mugged in New York City — said that he sees
a big opportunity for RapidSOS, and indeed emergency services in general, once
we start to join up the dots better between the trove of data that we can now
pick up with connected objects, and conveying what’s important in that trove in
order to make emergency calls more effective.
“Most
emergency communication today uses infrastructure established between the 1960s
and the 1980s, and it means that if you need 911 but can’t have a conversation
you are in trouble. 911 doesn’t even know your name when you call,” he said in
an interview. “But there is all this rich information today, and so our job is
to help make that available when you really need it.”
(I should
note he spoke to me while driving on a freeway, but he noted that the car he
was in was part of a RapidSOS pilot, and so if he did have an accident, at
least the responders would be more aware of what happened… Not a huge comfort,
but interesting.)
When you
consider the number of connected wearables, connected cars and other inanimate
objects that are now becoming “smart” through internet-based, wireless
controls, sensors and operating systems, you can see the strong potential of
harnessing that for this particular use case.
RapidSOS is
not the only company that’s addressing this gap in the market. Carbyne out of
Israel raised a growth round earlier this year led by Founders Fund in its
first investment in an Israeli startup, also to build systems to provide more
data for emergency services responders.
(Carbyne, by
coincidence, was also borne out of the CEO getting mugged: necessity really is
the mother of invention.)
“We are
completely different from Carbyne,” Martin said of the other startup. “They are
trying to provide more modern software to the industry” — where companies like
Motorola have long dominated — “and it’s great to see new innovation on that
front. But when we looked at industry, we found the challenge was not software
but the data that was being provided. There is a lot of information out there,
but no data flow, which is limited by the typical emergency response system to
512 bytes of data.”
He says that
RapidSOS, in that regard, works with multiple vendors, including Carbyne, to
transmit that data.
And it’s
that platform-agnostic approach that interestingly caught the eye of
Playground.
“RapidSOS is
on the forefront of emergency technology, working with companies like Apple,
Google, Uber, and Microsoft to transform emergency communication,” said Bruce
Leak, co-founder of Playground Global, in a statement. “We see endless
opportunities for connected device data to enhance emergency response and are
eager to work with RapidSOS to expand their life-saving platform.”
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