Self-styled emergency technology startup Carbyne Ltd. said today it has closed on a $25 million round of funding that brings its total amount raised to $53 million.

Hanaco Ventures and ELSTED Capital Partners led the Series B1 round, with participation from former CIA Director General David Petraeus and existing investors including Founders Fund and FinTLV.

Carbyne sells what it calls a cloud-native emergency collaboration platform that enables more streamlined communications between emergency responders and members of the public. The platform is essentially a 21st century upgrade to the outdated public safety and emergency response infrastructure that’s widely used today. It enables live video, images, chat, voice, VoIP, NLP and content sharing between callers and emergency call centers, helping response personnel better process, prioritize and deal with incoming emergency calls.

Most emergency services in the world are built on legacy phone networks and fail to take advantage of the capabilities of modern smartphones, which can provide much more detailed information to responders. Carbyne’s software automates data sharing, so for example, it can immediately pinpoint the caller’s exact location. In addition, it helps responders convey crucial information to the caller during a medical emergency, for example.

Carbyne has developed two products that do this, including an iOS and Android app called C-Now. It provides instant video and location data and other details that are essential to report to emergency responders. It also has a service called C-Lite (pictured, below) that plugs directly into legacy 911 services and enables responders to send links with pertinent information to callers without their needing to download the app.

Carbyne said its platform has proven its worth during the last year, at a time when emergency responders have faced unprecedented challenges relating to the coronavirus pandemic. The company claims to have deployed a new project somewhere in the world every 10 days since March 2020, growing its revenue by 350% in the process, on an undisclosed base. In the U.S., Carbyne has partnered with Global Medical Response and CentralSquare to extend its potential reach to 90% of the country.

“When COVID-19 first began, we saw governments were struggling with the ability to react to the volume of citizens’ unpredictable needs,” said Carbyne founder and Chief Executive Amir Elichai. “We’ve realized we have to act fast. In less than one month we’ve released many powerful features to support worldwide clients. All deployed remotely.”

In addition, he said the company has an advisory board with industry experts such as former secretaries of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and Michael Chertoff and former FEMA Director David Paulison.

Carbyne said it expects to have a “commanding presence” in every U.S. state by the end of 2023, and ultimately hopes to serve more than 1.5 billion people across the world.

“Times have changed, and so should the technology that is serving our citizens,” Elichai said. “In a modern age, facing unprecedented challenges, legacy solutions are failing our community when they need us most. It is no longer what the public expects or accepts.”

Photo: Steve White/Flickr