Originally published by Inc.com, written by Sarah Scoles, Freelance Writer @Scolessarah, September 24, 2024.
In April of last year, a couple went fishing in Florida's Choctawhatchee Bay. But events took a potentially deadly turn when the man fell overboard and the boat began drifting away from him. The woman needed to go get him, but the boat engine was stalled, and she didn't know how to start it. He was the captain, and he was in the water.
The woman called 911, and Walton County dispatcher Heather Mayo answered the call. But Mayo had a resource she could offer that goes beyond the typical 911 voice conversation."We have an app that we can use so we can video," she told the woman.
That app is called RapidDeploy. All the caller had to do was click a link that Mayo sent, giving camera permissions. Then, at the 911 center, workers could see what her phone saw. As soon as they had video feed, staff at the emergency center started Googling how to start that particular model of boat, and then directed the caller's engine-firing actions, watching as she completed them.
After the engine was whirring, the dispatcher used breadcrumbs from the woman's cell phone—pings showing her location every five seconds—to guide her toward where her husband had fallen. The boat had drifted in the wind because it was tall, whereas he had stayed relatively close to his initial location.
"I was in tears when I heard the story," says Steve Raucher, co-founder of RapidDeploy.
RapidDeploy is part of the Next-Generation 911 space—a space that encompasses a set of companies and innovations that aim to bring emergency services into the digital age. And they do it by providing emergency telecommunicators and first responders with data that's already out there but unused, such as video, precise locations, traffic information, feeds from cameras, and smartwatch health info. But getting RapidDeploy, or any other innovative 911 service, adopted into wide usage is a hard task, involving oodles of money and lots of different agencies.
One of RapidDeploy's key improvements is providing precise, GPS-based locations to 911 operators. When someone calls a center that uses RapidDeploy, the call-taker gets a push notification of the actual location from the device itself, rather than one triangulated from cell towers. This works "even if you're a privacy freak and you switched off all location services," says Raucher, who originally hails from South Africa. (You signed this particular privacy away in your phone contract in case of emergency.)
And RapidDeploy, cloud-based as it is, can get that geographical information even if 911 lines are down and your call dials but doesn't go through, a situation Americans have found themselves in multiple times just this year. Because the company directly integrates with handset manufacturers, they get callers' locations directly from the device.
Based on that location, RapidDeploy shows emergency services variables like live traffic and CCTV feeds near your car crash or kidnapping, and can video call or text you—in the latter case detecting 140 languages and automatically translating so the call-taker and the distressed can communicate no matter what. "That's all on one screen," says Raucher.
The digestible single-screen idea speaks to RapidDeploy's origin story, and Raucher's days on the financial trading floor—his first career. There, in the 90s, he initially had to eyeball eight monitors and juggle multiple telephones. But later, all of that became centralized into an eye-and-brain-friendly Bloomberg terminal. He wanted RapidDeploy's user interface to be similar—what he describes as a hypothetical collaboration between Fisher Price and Apple: simple, but aesthetically nice.
Not counting the two years he spent touring the world on a motorcycle (listed on his LinkedIn page as "London to Australia by Motorcycle"), Raucher spent two decades in finance, working in London and New York City. Midway, he experienced a tragedy: In 2006, Raucher's brother was swimming in the ocean outside Cape Town, where they grew up, when something went wrong. A rescue was mounted, but responders couldn't find him in time, and he drowned.
Raucher, who turned 31 the year that happened, lived with the tragedy for years and responded to it with action when he decided to take a break from banking. "I need a reset," he told his wife, around 2015, during a stint in London. He had a vacation home in Cape Town, and the couple retreated there.
Thinking of his brother, he visited the National Sea Rescue Institute, whose members had responded to that very personal emergency. "I went and knocked on their door and said, 'Guys, nine years ago, you had to try to save my brother. Didn't work out. I appreciate everything you did to try and do that and to pay it forward. What can I offer you? Do you need money? Do you need people?"
They had money; they needed people. "I volunteered on the spot," he says.
At the first meeting, Raucher saw people who had been giving of themselves to their community, for no money, for decades. It wasn't an attitude he'd come across in his London or New York circles. And he knew he wanted to do something like that: mission-based, not just money motivated. To start, he joined the rescue team, volunteering essentially full-time for a year. Eventually, though, he needed another job. And that's when he had a serendipitous dinner with a volunteer paramedic named Brett Meyerowitz. On evenings and weekends, Meyerowitz had been building an emergency dispatch system called RapidDeploy. Soon, he demoed the software for Raucher, tracking an emergency vehicle as it passed through Raucher's neighborhood, which Raucher then saw driving past his window.
That same week, in 2016, Raucher acquired half the business. And he and Meyerowitz were off chasing ambulances.
On their worst days, people rely on 911 services and the ambulances or police cruisers they can summon. "But up until the point they have to dial 911, they don't really think about how the system works," says Wesley Wright, executive director of the NG9-1-1 Institute, a nonprofit that provides information to the Congressional NextGen 911 Caucus. "They don't question that it will work. But it doesn't work as well as it could, thanks to its history tied to landlines and home addresses. "Today's 911 world is pretty much voice-only, and in some cases, text-capable," says Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association, a nonprofit dedicated to 911 operations, technology, education, and policy. That stands in contrast to the rest of modern life, where data feeds are abundant. The technology to get that data to emergency operators exists, says Fontes. "It just needs to be funded and deployed."
But that's costly and complicated, and requires training 911 workers who are, by definition, constantly in a state of emergency. "You have to maintain legacy systems while you build a new system," says Fontes. Often, states can't continue to bankroll their old systems while also giving new ones an allowance. "That's where the federal government steps in," says Wright. Or at least hopefully steps in.
The cost for that full switchover has been estimated at almost $15 billion, and while legislative efforts like the Next Generation 9-1-1 Act of 2023 are in the works, the action hasn't happened yet. Still, an ecosystem of startup companies like RapidDeploy stand ready to offer their next-gen services, and are making inroads in areas that do have the money for innovation.
Initially, Raucher and Meyerowitz intended RapidDeploy for South African deployment. But they ended up focusing on the US, after Raucher—once again serendipitously—sat next to Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association, at an emergency-number conference in Europe in 2017.
"I said, 'What are you doing here? You should be in the States,'" said Fontes.
And so Raucher went to the States. By March of 2019, California had procured RapidDeploy statewide. The Austin-based company is now home to 110 people and has raised $90 million of venture capital money. Today, you can find it in more than 1,700 emergency communications centers in 23 states. If federal funding comes through, those numbers could rise precipitously.
And putting new technology in the hands, and on the screens, of emergency workers could save the lives of people on the other end of those calls.
"If that was available in 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa, we'd be having a different conversation,"
says Raucher. "But I think we're going to change a lot of lives, a lot of outcomes."
Inc.com Article Link: https://www.inc.com/sarah-scoles/after-a-tragedy-this-founder-launched-a-company-to-finally-make-911-services-high-tech.html
