“My whole life has been preparing me for this moment,” Ben Sanders said when asked about why he launched his emergency response startup Hyper. The company announced Monday a $6.3 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, as well as an official emergence from stealth.
As a child, he so wanted to become a police officer that he had his mother sew yellow stripes on his navy sweatpants. He wore that with an officer’s rain hat for an entire year. As he grew up, he worked at the intersection of tech and government and once ran for federal office.
Around a year ago, he read a news article about how his hometown was looking to use AI to reduce the wait time for emergency services. Sanders, who once launched an AI voice for drive-through restaurants, suddenly had an idea. Though he didn’t think AI was quite ready to help with 911 calls, he felt this was a space for innovation, especially after realizing that most calls made to the emergency line are not considered emergency calls at all.
Sanders teamed up with his friend Damian McCabe. The duo officially launched Hyper on Monday, offering an AI voice company that can handle some 911 calls. Sanders, who is CEO, said the product is to deal with the non-emergency calls that take time away from those critical calls that determine the “difference between life and death.” McCabe is the company’s CPO.
Right now, even if a person looked to call their local police department, they would most often find a 10-digit number that routes them to the same people who take 911 calls.
“Imagine getting stuck talking to someone for eight minutes about a neighbor’s dog barking, only to answer the next call late, because of that noise complaint, and hear the trembling voice of a 5-year-old whose dad has just collapsed on the floor,” Sanders said.
Hyper answers questions, texts links, forwards calls, and even takes non-emergency police reports. “Hyper always plays it safe, so if any calls fall outside the approved scope, or if one sounds slightly more emergency, we can automatically escalate those to a human expert just in case.”
Sanders described the fundraising process as “frenetic, manic, and fast.” It took him less than two months to raise the whole round, which was ultimately oversubscribed and included follow-on capital. Ripple Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, VSC Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, and K5 Global also participated in the round. Sanders said he met his connection at Eniac Ventures through a mutual acquaintance.
Hyper hopes to use the fresh capital to help scale across the country, integrate more into existing 911 systems, hire a head of engineering, and build its next product. There is some competition in this space, like Aurelian, which also sorts non-emergency calls. Sanders said what makes Hyper different from the rest is its focus on 911.
“We train our models on real 911 calls with local agencies,” he said. “We support more languages. And we’ve already gone live with many centers, which is a big operational hurdle in government and public safety.”
Sanders hopes that Hyper can take away at least some of the stress associated with being a 911 caller, in a way that perhaps even brings more people to the profession. Right now, he says, most call centers are understaffed and struggling to hire.
“It’s such a tough job, I don’t even know if I could do it,” Sanders said. “But I know how to build technology that can help; to help call-takers and dispatchers who are the unsung heroes; to help reduce their burden by tackling the non-emergency calls and noise, and in doing so, ultimately help save lives.”