When Max Keenan joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch, he was working on Aurelian, the company that automates hair salon bookings. However, less than a year later, a conversation with one of his clients caught him in a much more important issue.
The nearby school’s car pool line was constantly blocking the parking lot of one of Aurelian’s hair salon clients. Salon owners called the city’s non-emergency line and were put on hold for 45 minutes before reaching the dispatcher. “She then called me to her office and it was like, ‘Max, do you want to help me?”,” Keenan told TechCrunch.
When he began studying how local government non-emergency response call centres work, he discovered that they are often handled by the same people answering real 911 emergencies.
Pivoted to build an AI voice assistant, Aurelian helps the 911 call center load up with non-emergency call volumes. The company announced Wednesday it had raised a $14 million Series A led by the NEA.
The company’s AI voice agent is designed to triage non-urgent issues such as noise complaints, parking violations and even stolen wallet reports.
Aurelian AI is trained to recognize real emergencies and immediately forward those calls to human dispatchers, Keenan said. In other circumstances, the system will gather important information and relay details directly to the police station for follow-up measures or directly to the details.
Since launching AI Assistant in May 2024, Aurelian has been deployed to more than 12 911 dispatch centers, including those serving Snohomish County, Washington. Chattanooga, Tennessee; Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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Emergency call centres are primarily adopted due to the consistent lack of staffing of Aurelians. This is a direct result of dispatching, and a direct result of dispatching being a high pressure job that ranks among high-ranking industries. Emergency dispatchers are often asked to work overtime, along with reporting 12-16 hours of workdays in a particular county.
“The reason we’re focusing most on 911 is because it’s the industry that has the most rapid issue,” Keenan said. “I think these telecoms should have a chance to take a break or go to the bathroom.”
“One of the things that blow my mind off, you’re not replacing existing people. You’re replacing people they want to hire but can’t,” said Mustafa Neemuchwala, a partner at NEA.
AI startups aren’t the only ones working on emergency non-emergency calls. The Hyper, who raised a $6.3 million seed round, came out of stealth last month. Prevent, a company founded in 2019, recently added AI voice solutions for emergency response.
But Aurelian believes its products are ahead of the competition. According to Neemuchwala, Aurelian is the only company that actually deploys and handles live calls. “As far as we know, no one else is actually alive,” he said.
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