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 his 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 Keenan into her office afterwards and asked if he wanted to help her out.
As he researched how municipal non-emergency call centers work, he discovered they are often handled by the same people who answer actual 911 emergencies. This realization prompted Aurelian to pivot. The company shifted its focus to building an AI voice assistant that helps 911 call centers offload non-emergency call volume. The company recently announced it raised a $14 million Series A funding round led by NEA.
The AI voice agent is designed to triage non-urgent issues like noise complaints, parking violations, and stolen wallet reports. These are situations that do not require an officer’s immediate response or can be handled without dispatching personnel to the scene. The AI is trained to recognize a real emergency and immediately transfer those calls to a human dispatcher. In non-emergency situations, the system collects key information and creates a report for the police department to follow up.
Since launching its AI assistant in May 2024, Aurelian has been deployed at more than a dozen 911 dispatch centers. These include centers serving Snohomish County in Washington, Chattanooga in Tennessee, and Kalamazoo in Michigan.
Emergency call centers are adopting this technology largely because they are consistently understaffed. Dispatching is a high-pressure job that ranks among the top 10 industries with the highest turnover rates. Dispatchers are often asked to work long overtime shifts, with reports of 12 to 16-hour workdays in certain counties.
Keenan stated that the company is most focused on 911 because it is the industry that feels this pain point most acutely. He believes telecommunicators should have a chance to take a break or use the bathroom without being overwhelmed by non-urgent calls.
Mustafa Neemuchwala, a partner at NEA, noted that the AI is not replacing an existing human being, but rather replacing a person they wanted to hire but could not find.
Aurelian is not 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.
However, Aurelian believes its product is ahead of the competition. According to Neemuchwala, Aurelian is the only company actually deployed and handling live calls. He stated that, as far as they know, nobody else is live, with Aurelian currently responding to thousands of actual calls every day.