A bit about the Safety Gap Podcast: When seconds count in an emergency, why do critical gaps still exist between enterprise data and first responders? The Safety Gap podcast pulls back the curtain on the hidden vulnerabilities in our emergency response systems. Join us as we sit down with visionary tech leaders and safety experts to explore the unseen challenges, innovative solutions, and transformative opportunities in connecting life-saving data with emergency services. From enterprise companies to public safety agencies, we’ll uncover the stories, strategies, and technologies shaping the future of emergency response.
It’s easy to forget about safety until the unthinkable occurs. Safety is an investment businesses hope is never actually put to the test. Because of that, it’s often overlooked. Today, massive gaps in emergency response put employees, customers, and operations at risk.
In a world of abundant information, 911 operators, first responders, and security experts struggle to get the intelligence they need to do their jobs and collaborate. Whether it’s an active shooter, train derailment, or health emergency, there are countless stories of safety professionals who were either inadvertently or unnecessarily put in harm’s way or didn’t have the context to respond appropriately.
This is the safety gap. And it’s what drove co-founder and CEO Michael Martin to start RapidSOS. What began as a project at MIT is helping 4,600 public safety organizations improve how they triage information and dispatch resources.
But with their own siloed data environments to worry about, many enterprises aren’t tapping into this robust, nationwide emergency ecosystem. Instead, a digital barrier often divides Global Security Operations Centers and 911 centers, significantly complicating responses and jeopardizing safety.
In our inaugural episode of the “The Safety Gap” podcast, we chatted with RapidSOS founder Michael Martin to learn why he started the company and how businesses can solve the challenge of siloed intelligence.
The Undercover 911 Heroes
For 911 operators, every day is chaos. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of calls come in, all mission-critical. Every second could mean life or death.
Consider this: Statistically, 75% of Americans called a 911 center last year. Under-resourced operators have to quickly try to piece together the situation in each call and determine the proper dispatch. These high-stakes decisions impact the safety of first responders and the community. And when mistakes happen, operators have to bear the ultimate burden.
“Every single 911 telecommunicator I talked to had stories of someone who died on the phone with 911 because they couldn’t be located,” said Martin.
It’s an enormous amount of pressure, yet there is virtually no national conversation about it. It’s time that 911 operators, first responders, and enterprise security teams reap the same benefits that digital technology now provides to nearly every other public and private sector function.
Instead, the growth of more advanced safety solutions makes it harder for 911 operators to figure out what’s happening. Data from all these new digital sources, like Internet-enabled cameras, is siloed. Businesses need a way to unify this information and connect it with data from 911 centers and other stakeholders to generate accurate, real-time intelligence that helps improve the overall emergency response.
However, it wasn’t until his first New York City mugging experience that Martin truly appreciated how much of a problem this safety gap was.
“911 was not something I’d ever thought about until this experience occurred,” he said.
Meeting the Co-Founders
That event crystallized the idea of using technology to help with emergency response. But after calling 911 centers nationwide, Martin quickly realized the problem required a national solution.
To develop the necessary technical and entrepreneurial skills, Martin applied to graduate schools and was accepted to Harvard Business School. But his future was at another Boston-area school: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Martin would routinely go to the MIT campus and spark conversations with random engineers, and he would even join social clubs.
One day, he saw an ad for a startup contest in which $100,000 would be given to founders to help with their burgeoning businesses. The catch was that applicants had to be MIT students. Martin started cold-calling engineers he had met. Eventually, he connected with Nick Horelik, who would become the co-founder of RapidSOS.
“He’d worked the suicide prevention hotline at Tufts in undergrad. And he had this intense story of a caller who was suicidal wandering through the Lower East Side of New York, and they couldn’t find him,” said Martin. “Nick would tell you to this day he doesn’t probably have closure on that.”
The two would go on to win a portion of that funding, which would transform RapidSOS’s journey.
Building the product
But now came the hard part of actually building the product.
Martin and Horelik traveled to agencies around the Boston area to get feedback, traversing over 1,500 miles in a Prius owned by Martin’s father. After winning several more startup competitions, the two eventually had enough information and capital to build an early version of the RapidSOS application.
However, several more hurdles would prevent them from perfecting the business model, including a failed Kickstarter campaign and a pivot from a consumer application.
We were “just going to stand up a web application,” said Martin. Instead, we had to “embed ourselves and build out infrastructure to be integrated with these existing systems that 911 centers were using to manage their operational flow.”
A pilot project with a large technology company helped Martin, Horelik, and the team troubleshoot the product. Outside investment came pouring in. Now, RapidSOS is in thousands of 911 centers around the U.S. But the job isn’t done.
“We support a little over half a billion devices today that can pass critical information in an emergency into 911 and first responder systems,” said Martin. “There’s over 20 billion connected devices globally. In an emergency, every connected device should work harmoniously with 911 and first responders to save your life.”