AI Startup Aurelian Raises $14M to Revolutionize 911 Call Centers with AI Voice Assistants

911 centers are so understaffed, they're turning to AI to answer calls | TechCrunch

When Max Keenan joined Y Combinator's summer 2022 batch, he was working on Aurelian, a company that automated appointment bookings for hair salons. But less than a year later, a conversation with one of his clients led him to a far more significant problem. A nearby school's carpool line was constantly blocking the parking lot of one of Aurelian's hair salon clients. The salon owner called the city's non-emergency line and was put on hold for 45 minutes before reaching a dispatcher. "She called me into her office afterwards, and was like, 'Max, do you want to help me out?'" Keenan told TechCrunch. When he started to research how municipal non-emergency response call centers work, he discovered that they are often handled by the same people who are answering actual 911 emergencies. Aurelian pivoted to building an AI voice assistant that helps 911 call centers offload non-emergency call volume. The company announced on Wednesday that it raised a $14 million Series A led by NEA. The company's AI voice agent is designed to triage non-urgent issues like noise complaints, parking violations, and even stolen wallet reports -- situations that don't need an officer's immediate response or can be handled without dispatching personnel to the scene. Aurelian's AI is trained to recognize a real emergency and immediately transfer those calls to a human dispatcher, Keenan said. In other situations, the system collects key information and either creates a report for or relays the details directly to the police department for follow-up action. Since launching its AI assistant in May 2024, Aurelian has been deployed at more than a dozen 911 dispatch centers, including those serving Snohomish County, Washington; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Emergency call centers are adopting Aurelian largely because they are consistently understaffed -- a direct result of dispatching being a high-pressure job that ranks among the top 10 industries with the highest turnover rates. Emergency dispatchers are often asked to work overtime, with reports of 12- to 16-hour workdays in certain counties. "The reason why we're most focused on 911 is because it's the industry that has this pain point most acutely," Keenan said. "We think that these telecommunicators should have a chance of taking a break or go to the bathroom." Mustafa Neemuchwala, a partner at NEA, said, "One of the things that blows my mind, like you're not replacing an existing human being, you're replacing a person they wanted to hire but couldn't." Aurelian isn't the only AI startup tackling non-emergency calls. Hyper, which raised a $6.3 million seed round, came out of stealth last month. Prepared, a company founded in 2019, also recently added an AI voice solution for emergency response. But Aurelian believes its product is ahead of the competition. According to Neemuchwala, Aurelian is the only company actually deployed and handling live calls. "As far as we know, nobody else is actually live," he said, referring to competitors responding to thousands of actual calls daily.

How a frustrated salon owner sparked a pivot to 911 call centers for this Seattle software startup

From searching your files to scheduling haircuts to supporting emergency response -- it's been a heck of an entrepreneurial journey for Max Keenan and James Liu. The young founders just raised $14 million for Aurelian, a Seattle-based company that uses AI and voice technology to help 911 call centers respond to non-emergency calls. Their path to Series A and product-market-fit has been a crash course in pivots and reinvention. After graduating from the University of Chicago, Keenan and Liu raised a pre-seed round for a company called Needl in 2022 and joined the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator. Needl aimed to build a personal search product to help people quickly find files, documents, or messages within their digital footprint. The company wasn't failing. But the co-founders weren't jazzed about the mission. "We just didn't love our customers," Keenan said. They sat down and asked themselves: what are we really trying to do here? "Our core framework for what we thought would make us happiest was if we were working with interesting tech for people who did meaningful work," Keenan recalled this week in an interview with GeekWire. "That was the combination we wanted." So they went back to the drawing board in 2023 and explored ideas around conversational AI, a technology that was rapidly improving thanks to advances in large language models. They started experimenting with salon booking -- helping small businesses automate appointment scheduling and price quotes. "It's surprisingly a really difficult problem," Keenan said. But it was a different problem that led the entrepreneurs to 911 call centers. Keenan was working with a salon owner who mentioned her frustration with a long stretch of cars in a school pickup line blocking the parking spots at her business. "She called the police department's non-emergency line and probably waited 30 or 40 minutes," Keenan said. Then she hung up and called 911. "Can you make it so the police answer the phone?" she asked Keenan. This was far from their area of expertise. But the founders recognized an opportunity to use software to help modernize a 911 call center industry that is struggling with staffing shortages and has been slow to adopt new technology. "Most are still working with on-premises software, and very few have gone fully into the cloud for their core systems," Keenan said. Call centers connect their existing phone lines to Aurelian's AI assistant, which answers calls, gathers information, and asks follow-up questions. It can fully resolve non-emergency calls (stolen wallets, parking violations, noise complaints) without a human dispatcher or re-route to an appropriate worker. The tech can also handle language nuance ("robbery" vs. "burglary") and vague location data. The idea is to help free up employees to address emergency calls with immediate needs while also reducing wait times for non-emergency requests. Since launching in May 2024, Aurelian has more than a dozen agencies across the U.S. using its product, including seven in Washington state. The technology is having immediate impact. Just a few days after Aurelian went live with Snohomish County, a huge "bomb cyclone" storm hit the Seattle region. Aurelian was able to answer more than 500 calls about power outages in a 24-hour span. "We answered every single one of those calls instantly," Keenan said. One call was from a woman who needed help with her husband's chair lift that was stuck halfway up the stairs. "We took that call, transferred it immediately, and had it answered in five seconds instead of an hour," Keenan said. Aurelian is on track to automate more than one million calls each month. NEA led the Series A round, which included participation from several of the company's original investors -- including Liquid 2 Ventures, Y Combinator, and Palm Drive Capital. "Kudos to the team for the incredible perseverance to find one of the best use cases for AI that we've seen in the past few years," Cameron Borumand, general partner at FUSE, told GeekWire. Keenan said he's learned to optimize for energy and excitement when it comes to building a business. "This was the first time we woke up every day excited to work with our customers," he said. "That's what I indexed on more than anything."

AI is coming to 911 dispatch centers - here's why it might be a good thing

The AI aims to free up human dispatchers for real emergencies and reduce wait times The idea of AI helping out with emergencies rightly raises some suspicious eyebrows, but there may be a way for the technology to ease the demands on overstretched 911 emergency operators without becoming an emergency itself. That's the pitch from a startup called Aurelian, which has begun rolling out a voice AI agent to help 911 dispatch centers handle the tidal wave of non-emergency calls that come in every day. Though we correctly tend to think of 911 as a direct line to life-or-death help, it turns out it's often the first number called for what could be called an emergency only in a 1950s sitcom. Think lost wallets, illegally parked cars, and loud parties. It's the default number many call when they are annoyed, regardless of whether they face a real emergency, and someone has to pick up and deal with that call, usually a human dispatcher with a lot of training in getting you help as soon as possible, and at spotting when the call is not an emergency by any stretch of imagination. At hour 10 of 16, trying to triage four conversations at once, while only one, if even that many, is an emergency, might not be the best use of their energy. Aurelian pitches itself as a solution to that problem, not as a replacement for humans in the position, but as a support service for them. Aurelian's answer is to use AI as a dispatcher for dispatchers. If you call 911 and Aurelian answers, it introduces itself as an automated assistant and asks why you're calling. Loud music complaints, petty theft reports, questions about snow removal, and similar non-emergencies are handled through follow-up questions, completing a report, and routing the information to the appropriate department. If the caller accidentally selects the wrong line or begins describing something that sounds like a genuine emergency, the system transfers the call straight to a human dispatcher. Since it launched last May, Aurelian claims its system is at the other end of 911 for almost five million people in the U.S. For those areas, Aurelian boasts that it is handling around three-quarters of non-emergency calls, taking up about three hours a day of the kinds of calls emergency dispatchers shouldn't have to answer. "911 is in a crisis: severe understaffing and ever-expanding responsibilities have made ECCs overextended and overworked. At Aurelian, our sole purpose is to help them best serve their communities," Aurelian CEO Max Keenan said in a statement. "911 call-takers are trained to handle emergencies, not parking complaints. Aurelian reduces burnout and helps telecommunicators stay focused on the most critical situations." The narrow targeting of AI to solve the very clear problem of too many 911 calls and not enough people to answer them is notable compared to some of the broad plans of other AI developers. The company also just raised $14 million in a funding round to help it scale and to solve the imperfections that any AI system is prone to. The company also makes a point of trying to ease any guild people might have about an AI service handling a job usually limited to humans. The idea is that AI isn't replacing emergency workers, but that it can help filter out the calls that the dispatchers aren't meant to deal with, but that can suck up all their time and energy. They can save that focus for navigating the emotionally fraught, time-sensitive calls for real emergencies, ones that require empathy, judgment, and decisiveness on their part. It also changes the public's experience. When you call in to report something that's annoying but not urgent, you no longer wait on hold for 45 minutes just to be told to fill out a form. You speak to a voice that can parse your issue and file the right report. And when you are in danger, there's a better chance someone will pick up faster because they're not stuck fielding a complaint about a shopping cart left in a driveway. If we're looking for clues about how AI might actually improve society, maybe this is the shape it takes.

911 Call Centers Are Understaffed. This Startup Just Raised $14 Million to Use AI to Reduce Wait Times.

Aurelian launched its AI assistant in May 2024 and has since deployed it to about a dozen locations. A new AI startup pivoted from automating appointment bookings for hair salons to building an AI voice assistant that handles non-emergency calls for 911 call centers -- and it just raised a $14 million Series A for its new focus on Wednesday. Max Keenan, the founder of Y Combinator-backed startup Aurelian, decided to pivot the company in response to a call from one of his clients, reports TechCrunch. The client, a hair salon owner, had a problem with a school's carpool lane blocking the salon's parking lot. When she called the city's non-emergency line about the matter, she was put on hold for 45 minutes, an exceedingly long wait time. The salon owner told Keenan about the experience, which prompted him to investigate how non-emergency call centers operate. He discovered that they are often staffed by the same personnel who answer 911 emergency calls and tend to be understaffed. Emergency dispatch is among the top 10 industries with the highest turnover rates. Related: She's a Former 911 Dispatcher Who Started a Side Hustle Dominated By Men -- and It Makes Her About $4,500 a Month: 'Hustle Paid Off' Keenan decided to change Aurelian's focus from automating hair salon bookings to handling non-emergency 911 calls, including those for noise complaints, stolen wallets, and parking violations. The startup's AI technology knows when to detect life-threatening emergencies and send those calls directly to human dispatchers. Aurelian launched its AI assistant in May 2024 and has since deployed it at 911 call centers in Snohomish County, Washington, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, in addition to about a dozen other locations. According to Aurelian's website, the AI assistant has saved each 911 dispatcher three hours every day on non-emergency calls, and automated 74% of calls without dispatcher intervention. "We think that these telecommunicators should have a chance of taking a break," Keenan told TechCrunch. Related: How to Make Smarter Decisions Under Pressure, From an ER Doctor Who's Done It for 20 Years Aurelian's AI is handling thousands of live calls a day, putting it a step ahead of the competition, including startups like Hyper and Prepared, which have not handled live calls yet, per TechCrunch. AI technology is also becoming a part of life in customer service calls. For example, CVS Health, which operates over 9,000 locations and 1,000 walk-in clinics across the U.S., introduced a new AI-based call system last year. Tilak Mandadi, CVS Health's chief digital, data, analytics, and technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal in June 2024 that if someone calls the pharmacy, AI will respond if it can answer the question. If the AI can't handle the inquiry, customers will be directed to a human agent. Other companies across industries have taken a similar approach. Fintech startup Klarna, famous for its "buy now, pay later" payment options, said in February 2024 that its customer service AI chatbot was doing the equivalent work of 700 human full-time employees. Klarna also used an AI clone of its CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, to summarize earnings in May, highlighting the reach of AI technology across business operations.

Aurelilan Raises $14 Million for AI That Fields Non-Emergency 911 Calls | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Now, its mission is to use artificial intelligence to handle non-emergency calls for 911 centers. Aurelian raised $14 million in a Series A funding round to help more emergency communications centers (ECCs) in the United States, according to a Wednesday (Aug. 27) press release. Aurelian CEO and co-founder Max Keenan said in the release that understaffing and increased responsibilities "have made ECCs overextended and overworked." "At Aurelian, our sole purpose is to help them best serve their communities," Keenan said in the release. "911 call-takers are trained to handle emergencies, not parking complaints. Aurelian reduces burnout and helps telecommunicators stay focused on the most critical situations." Launched in 2024, Aurelian's system serves nearly 5 million Americans, automating an average of nearly three-quarters of non-emergency calls for customers, handling things like noise complaints and parking violations without having to involve human dispatchers, according to the release. This saves each dispatcher three hours a day on average. Dispatcher jobs have some of the highest turnover rates in the country, TechCrunch reported Wednesday. These workers are often asked to put in overtime, with 12- or 16-hour workdays common in some places. "The reason why we're most focused on 911 is because it's the industry that has this pain point most acutely," Keenan said, per the report. "We think that these telecommunicators should have a chance of taking a break or go to the bathroom." Meanwhile, many companies are employing AI to take on customer service roles. "All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work," Benioff said. The "digital labor revolution" led by AI tools will add up to $3 trillion to $12 trillion of digital labor, including AI agents and robots, he said.

Aurelian Raises $14 Million for AI That Fields Non-Emergency 911 Calls | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Now, its mission is to use artificial intelligence to handle non-emergency calls for 911 centers. Aurelian raised $14 million in a Series A funding round to help more emergency communications centers (ECCs) in the United States, according to a Wednesday (Aug. 27) press release. Aurelian CEO and co-founder Max Keenan said in the release that understaffing and increased responsibilities "have made ECCs overextended and overworked." "At Aurelian, our sole purpose is to help them best serve their communities," Keenan said in the release. "911 call-takers are trained to handle emergencies, not parking complaints. Aurelian reduces burnout and helps telecommunicators stay focused on the most critical situations." Launched in 2024, Aurelian's system serves nearly 5 million Americans, automating an average of nearly three-quarters of non-emergency calls for customers, handling things like noise complaints and parking violations without having to involve human dispatchers, according to the release. This saves each dispatcher three hours a day on average. Dispatcher jobs have some of the highest turnover rates in the country, TechCrunch reported Wednesday. These workers are often asked to put in overtime, with 12- or 16-hour workdays common in some places. "The reason why we're most focused on 911 is because it's the industry that has this pain point most acutely," Keenan said, per the report. "We think that these telecommunicators should have a chance of taking a break or go to the bathroom." Meanwhile, many companies are employing AI to take on customer service roles. "All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher-value work," Benioff said. The "digital labor revolution" led by AI tools will add up to $3 trillion to $12 trillion of digital labor, including AI agents and robots, he said.