emergency response
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a16z leads investment in Firemaps, a marketplace for home hardening against wildfires
Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring a number of massive blazes under control.
With the climate increasingly warming, millions of homes just in the United States alone are sitting in zones at high risk for wildfires. Insurance companies and governments are putting acute pressure on homeowners to invest more in defending their homes in what is typically dubbed “hardening,” or ensuring that if fires do arrive, a home has the best chance to survive and not spread the disaster further.
SF-based Firemaps has a bold vision for rapidly scaling up and solving the problem of home hardening by making a complicated and time-consuming process as simple as possible.
The company, which was founded just a few months ago (in March), sends out a crew with a drone to survey a homeowner’s house and property if it is in a high-risk fire zone. Within 20 minutes, the team will have generated a high-resolution 3D model of the property down to the centimeter. From there, hardening options are identified and bids are sent out to trade contractors to perform the work on the company’s marketplace.
Once the drone scans a house, Firemaps can create a full CAD model of the structure and the nearby property. Image Credits: Firemaps.
While early, it’s already gotten traction. In addition to hundreds of homeowners who have signed up on its website and a few dozen that have been scanned, Andrew Chen of a16z has led a $5.5 million seed round into the business (the Form D places the round sometime around April). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Addition’s Lee Fixel also participated.
Firemaps is led by Jahan Khanna, who co-founded it along with his brother, who has a long-time background in civil engineering, and Rob Moran. Khanna was co-founder and CTO of early ridesharing startup Sidecar, where Moran joined as one of the company’s first employees. The trio spent cycles exploring how to work on climate problems, while staying focused on helping people in the here and now. “We have crossed certain thresholds [with the climate] and we need to get this problem under control,” Khanna said. “We are one part of the solution.”
Over the past few years Khanna and his brother explored opening a solar farm or a solar-powered home in California. “What was wild, whenever we talked to someone, is they said you cannot build anything in California since it will burn down,” Khanna said. “What is kind of the endgame of this?” As they explored fire hardening, they realized that millions of homeowners needed faster and cheaper options, and they needed them sooner rather than later.
While there are dozens of options to harden a home to fire, some popular options include constructing an ember-free zone within a few feet of a home, often by placing gravel made of granite on the ground, as well as ensuring that attic vents, gutters and siding are fireproof and can withstand high temperatures. These options can vary widely in cost, although some local and state governments have created reimbursement programs to allow homeowners to recoup at least some of the expenses of these improvements.
A Firemaps house in 3D model form with typical hardening options and associated prices. Image Credits: Firemaps.
The company’s business model is simple: vetted contractors pay Firemaps to be listed as an option on its platform. Khanna believes that because its drone offers a comprehensive model of a home, contractors will be able to bid for contracts without doing their own site visits. “These contractors are getting these shovel-ready projects, and their acquisition costs are basically zero,” Khanna said.
Long-term, “our operating hypothesis is that building a platform and building these models of homes is inherently valuable,” Khanna said. Right now, the company is launched in California, and the goal for the next year is to “get this model repeatable and scalable and that means doing hundreds of homes per week,” he said.
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RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design
Sometimes, the best missions are the hardest to fund.
For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support. There was just one problem: How would they create a viable business?
The roughly 5,700 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in America weren’t great contenders. Cash-strapped and highly decentralized, 911 centers already spent their meager budgets on staffing and maintaining decades-old equipment, and they had few resources to improve their systems. Plus, appropriations bills in Congress to modernize centers have languished for more than a decade, a topic we’ll explore more in part four of this EC-1.
Who would pay? Who was annoyed enough with America’s antiquated 911 system to be willing to shell out dollars to fix it?
People obviously desire better emergency services — after all, they are the ones who will dial 911 and demand help someday. Yet, they never think about emergencies until they actually happen, as RapidSOS learned from the poor adoption of its Haven app we discussed in part one. People weren’t ready to pay a monthly subscription for these services in advance.
So, who would pay? Who was annoyed enough with America’s antiquated 911 system to be willing to shell out dollars to fix it?
Ultimately, the company iterated itself into essentially an API layer between the thousands of PSAPs on one side and developers of apps and consumer devices on the other. These developers wanted to include safety features in their products, but didn’t want to engineer hundreds of software integrations across thousands of disparate agencies. RapidSOS’ business model thus became offering free software to 911 call centers while charging tech companies to connect through its platform.
It was a tough road and a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Without call center integrations, tech companies wouldn’t use the API — it was essentially useless in that case. Call centers, for their part, didn’t want to use software that didn’t offer any immediate value, even if it was being given away for free.
This is the story of how RapidSOS just plowed ahead against those headwinds from 2017 onward, ultimately netting itself hundreds of millions in venture funding, thousands of call agency clients, dozens of revenue deals with the likes of Apple, Google and Uber, and partnerships with more software integrators than any startup has any right to secure. Smart product decisions, a carefully calibrated business model and tenacity would eventually lend the company the escape velocity to not just expand across America, but increasingly across the world as well.
In this second part of the EC-1, I’ll analyze RapidSOS’ current product offerings and business strategy, explore the company’s pivot from consumer app to embedded technology and take a look at its nascent but growing international expansion efforts. It offers key lessons on the importance of iterating, how to secure the right customer feedback and determining the best product strategy.
The 411 on a 911 API
It became clear from the earliest stages of RapidSOS’ journey that getting data into the 911 center would be its first key challenge. The entire 911 system — even today in most states — is built for voice and not data.
Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS, who we met in the introduction, worked for decades at a PSAP near Denver, working her way up from call taker to a senior supervisor. “When I started, it was a one-man dispatch center. So, I was working alone, I was answering 911 calls, non-emergency calls, dispatching police, fire and EMS,” she said.
RapidSOS senior director of public safety Karin Marquez. Image Credits: RapidSOS
As a 911 call taker, her very first requirement for every call was figuring out where an emergency is taking place — even before characterizing what is happening. “Everything starts with location,” she said. “If I don’t know where you are, I can’t send you help. Everything else we can kind of start to build our house on. Every additional data [point] will help to give us a better understanding of what that emergency is, who may be involved, what kind of vehicle they’re involved in — but if I don’t have an address, I can’t send you help.”
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You can see fires, but now Qwake wants firefighters to see through them
When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will disrupt most forms of wireless communications, rendering software all but useless. From a technology perspective, not all that much has really changed today when it comes to how people respond to blazes.
Qwake Technologies, a startup based in San Francisco, is looking to upgrade the firefighting game with a hardware augmented reality headset named C-THRU. Worn by responders, the device scans surrounding and uploads key environmental data to the cloud, allowing all responders and incident commanders to have one common operating picture of their situation. The goal is to improve situational awareness and increase the effectiveness of firefighters, all while minimizing potential injuries and casualties.
The company, which was founded in 2015, just raised about $5.5 million in financing this week. The company’s CEO, Sam Cossman, declined to name the lead investor, citing a confidentiality clause in the term sheet. He characterized the strategic investor as a publicly-traded company, and Qwake is the first startup investment this company has made.
(Normally, I’d ignore fundings without these sorts of details, but given that I am obsessed with DisasterTech these days, why the hell not).
Qwake has had success in recent months with netting large government contracts as it approaches a wider release of its product in late-2021. It secured a $1.4 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security last year, and also secured a partnership with the U.S. Air Force along with RSA in April. In addition, it raised a bit of angel funding and participated in Verizon’s 5G First Responder Lab as part of its inaugural cohort (reminder that TechCrunch is still owned by Verizon).
Cossman, who founded Qwake along with John Long, Mike Ralston, and Omer Haciomeroglu, has long been interested in fires, and specifically, volcanos. For years, he has been an expeditionary videographer and innovator who climbed calderas and attempted to bridge the gap between audiences, humanitarian response, and science.
“A lot of the work that I have done up until this point was focused on earth science and volcanoes,” he said. “A lot of projects were focused on predicting volcanic eruptions and looking at using sensor networks and different things of that nature to make people who live in those regions that are exposed to volcanic threats safer.”
During one project in Nicaragua, his team suddenly found itself lost amidst the smoke of an active volcano. There were “thick, dense superheated volcanic gases that prevented us from navigating correctly,” Cossman said. He wanted to find technology that might help them navigate in those conditions in the future, so he explored the products available to firefighters. “We figured, ‘Surely these men and women have figured out how do you see in austere environments, how do you make quick decisions, etc.’”
He was left disappointed, but also with a new vision: to build such technology himself. And thus, Qwake was born. “I was pissed off that the men and women who arguably need this stuff more than anybody — certainly more than a consumer — didn’t have anywhere to get it, and yet it was entirely possible,” he said. “But it was only being talked about in science fiction, so I’ve dedicated the last six years or so to make this thing real.”
Building such a product required a diverse set of talent, including hardware engineering, neuroscience, firefighting, product design and more. “We started tinkering and building this prototype. And it very interestingly got the attention of the firefighting community,” Cossman said.
Qwake offers a helmet-based IoT product that firefighters wear to collect data from environments. Image Credits: Qwake Technologies
Qwake at the time didn’t know any firefighters, and as the founders did customer calls, they learned that sensors and cameras weren’t really what responders needed. Instead, they wanted more operational clarity: not just more data inputs, but systems that can take all that noise, synthesize it, and relay critical information to them about exactly what’s going on in an environment and what the next steps should be.
Ultimately, Qwake built a full solution, including both an IoT device that attaches to a firefighter’s helmet and also a tablet-based application that processes the sensor data coming in and attempts to synchronize information from all teams simultaneously. The cloud ties it all together.
So far, the company has design customers with the fire departments of Menlo Park, California and Boston. With the new funding, the team is looking to advance the state of its prototype and get it ready for wider distribution by readying it for scalable manufacturing as it approaches a more public launch later this year.
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RapidSOS and Axon ink deal to give better real-time information to emergency responders
Every time an emergency responder or police officer responds to a 911 dispatch, they enter an unknown terrain. What’s the incident? Who’s involved? Is anyone dangerous or holding a weapon? Is someone injured and perhaps has an underlying health condition that the responders need to know about? As prominent news stories this week and over the last few years constantly remind us, having the right context while responding can turn a potential tragedy into a much more positive story.
RapidSOS is a startup I’ve been watching for years. The company raised an $85 million Series C round this February to bring real-time location information from all sorts of devices — from Apple and Android smartphones to Sirius XM satellite radios — into the hands of 911 call centers when users make an emergency call. Accurate location can help dispatchers send responders to exactly the right place, offering faster assistance and therefore saving lives.
The company announced this morning a new partnership with Axon, the company behind Taser, the electroshock weapon designed as a non-lethal alternative to traditional firearms, and a variety of body cams and other technologies for public safety officials. In recent years, Axon has increasingly emphasized a suite of cloud offerings that can fuse data from its devices with software to create operations systems for public safety agencies.
Through the partnership, Axon will integrate the data that its devices generate, such as body cam footage and Taser discharge alerts, into RapidSOS’s Jurisdiction View, which is used by dispatchers to place on a visual map a location and relevant information from a caller. For instance, a dispatcher might now know the location of police or medical responders, and be able to update a 911 caller on the estimated time of arrival or whether they need help getting access to a location.
Likewise, RapidSOS’s location, medical and other information that it pulls in from user devices during an emergency call will be sent to Axon Respond devices. Frontline responders will therefore have direct access to a 911 caller’s location information or medical information if they have a profile setup, without having to wait for a dispatcher to route those facts to them.
Josh Pepper, VP of product management at Axon, said, “What we’re always trying to do is how can we get [first responders] the right information about the incident, the right information about the people involved, the right information about the location and all of the disposition of the units involved, as fast and as accurately as we can … so that they can have situational awareness of what’s happening.” RapidSOS’s data will augment other information streams, helping first responders make those critical split-second decisions.
Michael Martin, CEO and co-founder of RapidSOS, said, “for the first time now, your smartphone, your 911 responder and the police officer in the field can all simultaneously and transparently share data with each other.”
In tech, we are used to having comprehensive information about our products through data analytics. In the emergency space — even today — first responders can lack even the most rudimentary information like location when responding to a call. RapidSOS, Axon and a slew of other companies are trying to bridge that digital divide.
A UI mockup of how Axon’s information will display within RapidSOS’s Jurisdiction View. RapidSOS notes that “This image is for illustration purposes only and does not represent the final solution interface.” Image Credits: RapidSOS
This is the Jurisdiction View from RapidSOS’s platform, with a few elements added to mock up how Axon’s information will be integrated into the product. The two starred badges represent the locations of responding police officers in the field, converging on the location (green pin) of a 911 caller. In the bottom-right corner, a live body cam feed from a police officer can be routed straight to a 911 dispatcher, giving them a real-time look at what is transpiring on the ground. Meanwhile in the info box to the left, we can see that a Taser weapon was fired (noted under “Device Alerts”) and the 911 dispatcher can send text to the responding officer directly through the platform.
The companies said the partnership will bear fruit this year as both platforms integrate the data streams into their respective products.
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911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage
911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.
The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”
In a tweet, the telecoms giant said it was “working tirelessly” to get its affected systems back up and running.
CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.
In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.
Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.
Who is #CRESA and what does this mean? How is 911 down. I don’t need to call but this is alarming pic.twitter.com/MB7f6iZTnn
— its_lady_kc (@its_lady_kc) December 28, 2018
Among the areas affected include Seattle, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several other states, including Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Missouri, are also affected, local news has reported.
Many other police departments tweeted out alternative numbers for 911 in the event of an emergency.
Police in Boston, Massachusetts tweeted that their service was restored this morning.
UPDATE: Technical issues with the 911 system, and the resulting wireless capability outages, have been resolved. Massachusetts callers may resume using 911 from their cell phones for public safety emergencies. https://t.co/6AAeRdVxeN
— Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) December 28, 2018
Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates and monitors 911 services, said the commission is investigating the outage.
“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” said Pai in a statement. “The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.”
“I’ve directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage. This inquiry will include an examination of the effect that CenturyLink’s outage appears to have had on other providers’ 911 services,” he said.
TechCrunch will have more when it comes in.
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Carbyne wants to replace outdated 911 systems
Israel-based Carbyne has developed an emergency call-handling platform, supported by an ecosystem that integrates live video streaming, location services and texting capabilities.
After Amir Elichai, founder and CEO, was robbed on Tel Aviv beach in 2013, he called the police and had to trudge through a tedious, long-winded conversation with the dispatcher (“Where are you, what happened, etc.”) before help was finally sent. Out of frustration, he started Carbyne. “If Uber and the pizza delivery guy can determine where we are, why can’t 911?”
The company is currently focused on what they call, “time to dispatch” – the duration from when the call is placed to the moment services are sent to the field. To minimize this length, two crucial pieces of information need to be delivered: exact location and an understanding of the situation. They’ve achieved this by utilizing device-based location technology, but stepped up the game with an indoor positioning solution where first responders can pinpoint a caller’s location within a one-meter accuracy, within a matter of seconds. To assess the situation, they’ve implemented live video streaming, which is accessed through the caller’s permission. “When you combine the two, it cuts the dispatch time by 60-65 percent. In terms of saving lives, that’s huge,” Elichai explained.
The biggest challenge
Emergency response systems are based on landline technology. They’re unable to take advantage of smartphone capabilities such as chat, video or GPS. Rather than trying to integrate their platform into these legacy infrastructures, Carbyne plans to replace them all. They’ve already deployed systems in Israel, Asia, Europe and Latin America, and recently signed their first deal in the United States with Fayette County, Georgia.
Despite the platform’s clear benefits, the challenge lies within strict government regulations, varying from country to country, municipality to municipality. “First you have to convince the authorities,” said Elichai. “Some of them are curious, some of them have fears with new technologies, such as cybersecurity threats. You’re changing and disrupting the way they work so you have to educate them and show them how this system can help them.”
Though they’re currently focused on dispatch times, the next phase will be the ability to deliver medical information to hospitals so the appropriate equipment can be prepared for ambulances. “This entire ecosystem is very huge and complex around the world, and we have a lot of work to do,” Elichai said in closing.
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