New York-headquartered public safety startup Prepared has raised USD 27m in a Series B for its platform, which serves first responders in 911 centers and in the field. Among the features Prepared highlights to differentiate itself: “two-way audio and text translation.”

The lineup of this round’s investors includes repeat leader Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from First Round Capital, M13, and NewView Capital.

The Series B brings Prepared’s funding raised to date to nearly USD 60m — not bad for a company launched in 2019 by three Yale undergraduates.

Co-founders Dylan Gleicher, Neal Soni, and Michael Chime found they had all grown up near sites of school shootings, and wondered if there was a better way for schools and other large campuses to keep their students safe.

“Prepared was formed around one key insight — that our smartphones, laptops, and desktops are the most powerful and adaptable modes of communication ever built,” Chime wrote in a December 2020 announcement of a USD 1.8m pre-seed raise.

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Public safety infrastructure, in other words, has lagged behind the technological advancements that are now standard in private life, with 911 centers still operating under the assumption that callers are using landlines, even though most calls come from cell phones. 

“As we see it, the tools that schools need to make significant improvements in safety are already in everyone’s hands — they just need to be activated and used in the right way,” Chime added. By this point, Prepared had already brought its infrastructure to nearly 150 US schools. 

In April 2022, however, Prepared pivoted from school systems, seeing 911 centers and fire and police departments as its main client base. Forbes reported at the time Prepared’s technology was in use by call centers covering more than 20% of the US population.

Now, the Prepared platform enables callers to do things like livestream or send multimedia content to 911 centers, giving first responders valuable information that helps them pinpoint the location of the emergency and better prepare for the situation at hand.

Since refocusing on emergency response teams, Prepared has begun to incorporate concerns about populations with limited English proficiency (LEP) into its marketing materials. 

“This future will ensure […] every 911 caller can be understood, no matter the language, with real-time translation,” the September 26, 2024 press release reads, noting that “[t]he gap is felt every day” by non-English-speakers waiting precious minutes for an interpreter. 

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Prepared’s language services, while not the primary offering, already include “text, audio, and text-to-voice translation.” 

The platform recognizes audio in 33 languages and text in more than 140 languages, and one tool can translate 911 audio transcripts into more than 30 languages. Most recently, in August 2024, Prepared debuted “two-way audio translation” — i.e., speech-to-speech translation — for English and Spanish.

“Today, 911 call takers must conference a third-party translator and wait for them to join, which wastes precious time during an emergency,” a press release explained. 

The new feature will automatically translate audio from Spanish-language calls into English text for the call taker, who can type a response in English to be automatically translated into Spanish and “spoken back to the caller through an AI-generated voice feature.”