The company focuses on one of the leading edges of public safety technology: real-time and livestreamed 911 call data.
Those are increasingly important as daily communication becomes more dependent on mobile devices and as police, firefighters and medical workers demand precise, virtually pointillistic geographic, incident and victim data to quicken responses.
Prepared launched in 2019 and debuted its platform in late 2021.
The company built its profile by offering its basic technology free to emergency dispatchers. Now, nearly 12 months after the seed funding, the company says it has partnered with at least 10 percent of U.S. 911 call centers — dispatch operations that serve about 18 percent of the country’s population. Emergency responders in Denver, Kansas City, Maine, Baltimore and Hawaii are among those using Prepared’s tools.
Prepared has moved beyond that free service model with its launch of Prepared Live Enhanced, which the company described as “the first paid tier of features for the … free Prepared Live platform.”
Dispatchers can use that product to handle what the company called “their most difficult calls” without adding screens or messing with usual workflows.
The company also has launched Prepared OnScene, which sends live video, photo, text and GPS data directly to responders in the field, giving them “a heightened level of situational awareness,” according to the company’s statement.
A new website and text translation for more than 130 languages also make up part of this latest push from Prepared, Michael Chime, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Government Technology.
As he sees it, this shift to livestreaming and real-time data for emergency calls represents as important a change as moving from radio to TV. Such technology will reduce the chances that emergency calls and information sharing devolves into “a game of telephone,” he said.
“We capture TV-like data,” Chime said. “This thirst for data is strong. It’s what [emergency response] pros have been talking about for their whole careers.”
In a more general sense, he wouldn’t talk much about when Prepared might raise new capital, saying only that companies that are well-funded have a “strategic advantage,” and that Prepared operates in an especially hot area of government technology.
“There is no better place to build than public safety,” Chime said.
