Backed by Responder Corp’s investment firm Responder Ventures in partnership with Amazon Web Services, ResponderXLabs launched its event series in 2018 with two conferences in October and November, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in San Francisco, featuring booths and presentations from 16 startups.
In a news release this week, ResponderXLabs listed 20 startups that will exhibit cloud-enabled innovations for first responders at 10 free events staggered throughout the year:
- Carbyne, a 911 call-handling platform
- Waycare, an AI tool for traffic planning
- Geospiza, a disaster-preparedness platform
- Tango Tango, an interoperable communication tool for radios and smartphones
- SkyeBrowse, a visual data-gathering tool for drones
- Nightingale Security, a surveillance drone system
- Wi-Fiber, which builds smart lampposts
- openALPR, a license-plate recognition tool
- Mersoft, which specializes in live video streaming
- GlobeKeeper, a tactical communication platform
- AGIS Inc., which makes media and communications systems
- SOMA Global, a cloud-based platform of public safety tools
- Yardarm Technologies, advanced sensors for firearms
- Whitefox Defense Technologies, for managing drones in sensitive airspace
- Two-Six Labs, a data analytics and cybersecurity company
- Venti, sensors that collect environmental data
- FlyMotion, which offers drone tools and services
- Synapse, a threat-detection system for X-rays and CT scans
- Centrallo, an information-sharing platform
- First Due, a pre-incident planning and response platform
Responder Corp Co-Founder and President Bryce Stirton told Government Technology that although there are 20 companies on the list for 2019, each event will only showcase 15. He said Responder Corp and AWS chose these from more than 100 applicants based on their potential impact for the market, the quality of their technology and the ability of their teams to execute.
Two of the companies on the new list, Geospiza and Synapse, had a showing at ResponderXLabs events in 2018 as well. Stirton said they were not technically part of the program last year but wanted to show off what they had, and they’ve officially joined the program this year.
Stirton said ResponderXLabs’ program coaches and tests select startups and their technologies to make sure they’re prepared for government customers, then trots them out at aforementioned live events, usually on the second Thursday of every month in a different city.
“One of the things that we found being in this space, through Responder Ventures, is that a lot of public-safety agencies don’t associate innovation with [such] high-quality ... companies. They associate it with a risk that they took two years ago that didn’t work out,” he said. “The goal … is to say, ‘The technology you’re going to see there, they’ve been curated, they’ve been vetted and they’ve been enabled’ … We tried it ourselves, we confirmed the technology works, we confirmed that they have satisfied customers, so if you guys come to our event, you’re able to see curated and enabled technology.”
Stirton said he was “ecstatic” about the response to last year’s inaugural events, which suggested to the ResponderXLabs team they were closing a gap between what first responders need and what’s available to them.
“The biggest thing we needed to test was how the end-users, the first responders and public-safety agency leaders, felt about the technologies they saw, because our thesis going into this was that a lot of them weren’t aware that this many advanced, market-ready technologies were available,” he said. “We continually got feedback from attendees that it’s great to know these solutions are out there.”
