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Emergency services, long operating on legacy platforms, are now experiencing major technological advances, and today one of the biggest players in that space is announcing funding to better target the opportunity. Carbine, a startup that designs systems used by emergency services to handle calls for medical, public safety, transportation and other urgent needs, has raised $56 million — a Series C that comes on the heels of the company’s 400% increase in revenue last year. . Today, its technology is installed in emergency response services that cover nearly 400 million people and handle 150 million 911 calls each year.
Carbon founder and CEO Amir Elichai said in an interview with TechCrunch that the company is targeting to cover 1 billion people by 2024 (it’s on track).
“With this new funding, our main investments will be to expand in the US, target opportunities that we don’t sell directly internationally, and establish a strong partner program to further invest in R&D,” he said.
The goal is to build more tools to make those working in emergency contact centers smarter, more efficient, and less stressed in their work. “There are many new innovations to improve sentiment analysis, trauma detection and more. More data is coming in now, how can it be. [that be used] To help with stress? I am talking about the call people and the people who work in these centers.
Cox Enterprises and Hanaco Growth Fund are co-leading the round with new backers Valor Equity Partners, General Global Capital, TalC and Sandiip Bhammer, as well as previous backers Founders Fund, FinTLV, Elsted Capital Partners and General David Petraeus. Probably because he was a former director of the CIA.
The funding values the company at $400 million, which is three times the valuation in Series B (in two installments, $25 million in January 2021 and an additional $20 million a few months later), Elichai said. The startup, founded in Israel – where it still operates its R&D – but now headquartered in New York, has raised $128 million to date.
The rise of carbon comes big time for urgent care.
Emergency services and the front-line workers who manage them have found themselves in the spotlight with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic: in many cases, they have become the critical link between people who are isolating themselves in the physical world and medical care for public health reasons. And when other urgent services are needed.
But that focus has highlighted another pressing detail: emergency services are under enormous pressure, and often operating in highly fragmented ecosystems with primitive technology. Emergency services centers — the ones that process and identify 911 calls when they come in — number 6,500 in the U.S. alone, and that’s before considering the other partners between the person calling for help and the people who can provide it.
The carbine – which today operates primarily in the US, but may eventually enter other markets – sits squarely in the gap between the two poles. It’s about building technology to improve the response of those emergency teams, the information they use to do their jobs, and their overall operations. That could include not only more efficient technology to get questions to the right people, but also more data to help people in emergency response centers provide more accurate help.
The layout is very practical, in some cases it works with some older devices. Others, it’s being introduced as part of larger digital transformation projects after emergency response systems were found to be outdated and unfit for purpose, and so we’re seeing more organizations migrating to the cloud.
Some have argued that COVID-19 was, so to speak, a canary in the coal mine. Generally, there are forces that lead to more than making fewer emergency calls. Climate change causes more severe natural disasters; Crime rates and mass incidents requiring emergency assistance seem to be on the rise. And the fact that healthcare and public services are becoming increasingly complex to navigate directly is putting more emphasis on how to identify and handle calls. All these lands are located at the foot of the emergency response centers, which become more advanced nerve centers.
That’s something the U.S. government is trying to take a step further, with the House recently green-lighting a $10 billion package to modernize the remaining infrastructure and implement next-generation 911 technologies developed by Carbine. The company has long been delivering some of the largest deals using Carbine’s cloud-based APEX platform in partnership with the city of New Orleans, Louisiana.
“Rehabilitating aging infrastructure in the U.S. is long overdue,” Davis Roberson, associate vice president of strategy and investments at Cox Enterprises, said in a statement. “The technology that Carbine delivers is resilient, interactive and secure. We look forward to working with Carbine to bring this critical technology to more communities and organizations.”
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