If you were in a car accident or facing a medical emergency, who is the first person you would call? Likely 911. It’s a system that is designed to be a lifeline for individuals in every community across the United States, providing quick emergency response in those moments where you need it the most.
As users, we usually demand our technology to be intuitive except when it matters most – in an emergency. In these often frenzied or difficult situations, we are left to fully and clearly articulate our location, what the emergency is, and how we want to be assisted. This isn’t just a nuisance; it can waste precious time or lead to the delivery of inaccurate data when just seconds or minutes can make a difference.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where these types of emergencies feel more common than ever. An estimated 240 million 911 calls were made in 2021 – a year filled with health crises, mental health emergencies, natural disasters, school shootings, and other events that dominated headlines and created devastation on an individual, community and national scale. It’s more important than ever that we have the systems in place to address these situations quickly and at scale – when just seconds matter.
We’ve seen digital transformation occur across many industries – leveraging cloud, crowd and artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize and improve how we operate at home and at work. But that same transformation has yet to hit the 911 sector in a major way. Until now.
NightDragon is proud to announce we are leading a $75 million investment in RapidSOS, the intelligent safety platform used by 15,000 public safety agencies and by leading technology companies around the world. NightDragon feels passionate about safety as a sector ripe for digital transformation, investing in it as a core pillar of our overall firm platform to better secure our world for tomorrow. The need for improvement around our 911 infrastructure is immediate, clearly representing one of the biggest safety issues of our time.
Together with our RapidSOS Ready partners, RapidSOS supports first responders in helping save millions of lives annually. RapidSOS is an intelligent safety platform that securely links life-saving data from 400+ million connected devices and buildings directly to RapidSOS Safety Agents, 911 and first responders globally. RapidSOS pulls data from devices — such as smartphones, smartwatches and medical devices to home security and connected vehicles — to route critical data including location, medical and vehicle information to telecommunications and ultimately first responders. In 2021, RapidSOS supported 165 million emergencies by providing accurate location and/or additional information.
RapidSOS fundamentally transforms the current 911 service into a digital infrastructure, in an effort to modernize communications and how society seeks help in an emergency. It accomplishes this by partnering with different technology companies in various industries to provide safe and secure access to 911 in case of an incident. RapidSOS additionally works with technology companies to develop better features and integrate services that facilitate information and make emergency response more efficient for telecommunicators and first responders.
This includes:
- Working with apps such as Uber and Instacart to enable innovative ways to connect Gig economy workers to emergency services
- Developing features that streamline emergency response to home and business security systems, and eliminate false alarms
- Creating distinct ways to additionally share information with emergency response teams in a safe and secure format
This is the future of 911 and emergency response where contextually rich data is available in real time to activate help, verify and deploy resources to a variety of responders, and convey critical updates. This technology is available today with RapidSOS, we just have to leverage its full potential at scale. The investment will serve to help further fuel this growth, including accelerating go-to-market, product development and international expansion.
We look forward to working closely with CEO Michael Martin and the rest of the incredible RapidSOS team to help the company further fuel its growth to become the de facto intelligent safety platform in the world. No one should have to wait to get the care or support they need, and first responders must be equipped with the data they need to deliver their services effectively and safely.
Read more about NightDragon’s investment in RapidSOS in the press release.
To learn about the other companies in the NightDragon portfolio, visit our Portfolio page.
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