RapidDeploy has had a wild few months.
In August, the emergency response dispatching platform secured a deal with AT&T to support U.S. based 911 calls with RapidDeploy’s software. In September, the company relocated its headquarters from Cape Town, South Africa, to Austin.
Now, RapidDeploy has another big announcement: A $12 million Series A.
RapidDeploy is the first truly cloud and web-native ecosystem for public safety.”
GreatPoint Ventures and Samsung NEXT participated in the round of funding, which will be used to fuel RapidDeploy’s next phase of growth.
“RapidDeploy invests heavily in research and development, and this will continue,” said RapidDeploy CEO Steve Raucher. “We recently moved our global headquarters to Austin, and we will continue to hire here for customer success, change management, project management and engineering.”
Raucher, a former banker-turned first responder-turned tech leader, joined RapidDeploy CTO and founder Brett Meyerowitz in 2016. Meyerowitz, a volunteer paramedic since 2012, founded the company in 2013 to improve and automate the processes involved in emergency dispatch.
“RapidDeploy is the first truly cloud- and web-native ecosystem for public safety,” said Raucher. “On average, emergency services running RapidDeploy experience a 30 percent efficiency gain across the entire workflow from call ingestion to on-scene time.”
Its cloud-based solution can pinpoint precise address locations of incidents and improve situational awareness for emergency teams. Additionally, using AI, RapidDeploy’s platform offers predictive and prescriptive analytics from historical and incoming emergency-related data.
Plus, according to RapidDeploy, its solutions are faster to adopt, less expensive and of higher quality than traditional dispatch software.
“We use AI and cognitive services for a number of workflows,” said Raucher. “This includes automatically identifying context of media, whether video, or photo; understanding sentiment and flagging sentiment in communications; using predictive analytics models to help calculate travel times and availability, fleet-wide. We have a number of ideas we are still implementing using this powerful tool.”
As the company’s grown, Raucher’s added a number of public safety and industry experts to his team, including Ryan Chambers, a training specialist who served a total of 12 years as a fire fighter, 911 telecommunicator, and professional public safety instructor.
Raucher said the company looks to hire about 15 to 25 more people in Austin in the near future.
