On Prepared’s Journey: Zero-to-Acquisition and Beyond
After nearly seven years building Prepared — from three founders in a dorm room to a 100+ person company today — I’m pumped to share that Prepared is joining Axon.
This moment marks not just an acquisition, but a continuation of the mission that has guided us since the very beginning: making sure every emergency gets the perfect response. Along the way, we’ve lived through sleepless nights, built and reinvented products, made our share of mistakes, and learned from every single one. What has kept us moving forward is simple — the knowledge that our work directly saves lives.
I want to take a step back and share the story of Prepared’s journey: how it started in schools, grew into live video for 911, expanded into AI for emergency response, and why joining forces with Axon is the most important step yet.
Act 1: School Safety
During my senior year of high school, there was a student who we were told had access to a gun and a plan to shoot up the school. My school went into lockdown and evacuated. That year there was a school shooting almost every other day.
Prepared started in our dorm room that same year. We were three college students with a simple idea — could we use our experience building mobile applications in schools to mitigate this school shooting epidemic that shaped our generation.
Prepared started with the mission to mitigate the school shooting epidemic. We built mobile applications to both preempt and prevent school shootings, and launched those applications in over 100 schools across the country (including New Haven Public Schools).
As the company grew, our understanding of public safety expanded. We went into our first 911 centers in 2021 — looking to enable emergency services with the lifesaving data we were collecting in schools. We expected to see some of the best technology in the world, but left shocked at the state of technology backing 911. We interacted with calltakers, dispatchers, first responders all eager for new technology to solve problems they have had for literally decades.
Act 2: Live Video for 911
That year Prepared launched its first 911 product — live video to 911. The simple idea of sending a link to a 911 caller to upgrade the audio experience to live video — instead of telling the operator what is happening you could show them. Two weeks after launching and training our initial beta 911 call center, it directly helped save its first life on a telecommunication-initiated CPR call.
After this lifesaving incident, we wondered if we were able to get this solution into every 911 center, would we save more lives? We decided it was our duty to go all in on that theory. We removed all barriers to adoption, offering the solution for free, and invested in getting the solution turned on and used in as many 911 centers as possible.
Over the next 2.5 years, we signed up nearly 1000 911 centers on Prepared Live, covering 20% of the United States. Our theory turned out to be correct, we get live saving stories nearly every week on Prepared’s live video solution.
Act 3: AI Conductor for Emergency Response
As we worked alongside 911 centers, we witnessed a recurring challenge: call-takers and dispatchers were constrained not by their skill or dedication, but by the limitations of the tools in front of them. Information flowed like a relay race — caller to call-taker, to dispatcher, to responder—where each handoff compressed and reduced the context, leaving responders with only fragments of the original picture.
The Prepared Platform was built to solve these challenges. By ingesting call audio, video, notes, radio audio, and responder updates in real time, the platform acts as an AI assistant to every single person in the emergency response process — and every link in the chain is strengthened.
This shift expanded our mission: not just building software to save lives, but to help ensure that every emergency receives the perfect response.
This broadened our perspective and pushed us to rethink fundamental assumptions in emergency response — not “how do I fix this problem” but rather “how do I make this problem not happen in the first place.” This mindset led to platform of solutions Prepared has so far:
- Assistive Non-Emergency Triage: AI Agent that handles non-emergency calls — preventing non-emergency calls and spikes from reaching calltakers.
- Assistive Call-Taking: Transcribing, summarizing, and translating calls in real-time for operators. Giving all parties unparalleled context and superpowers in every emergency.
- Assistive Quality Assurance: Up-leveling every individual, increasing the quality of care on every call, and improving employee retention.
- Assistive Dispatch: Transcribing the hardest to understand radio transmissions, giving dispatchers unparalleled ability to multitask.
- Real-Time Audio Streaming for DFR/RTCC: Enabling negative response times in the most critical incidents. Drones arriving before CAD incident creation.
Every time Prepared goes live in a large agency, it is used to save a life in a way not thought possible before within the first week. Accelerating customers signing on, and getting live, accelerates the lives we can impact.
Act 4: Joining Forces with Axon
Prepared’s guiding principle has always been clear: improve public safety outcomes by empowering the heroes behind the console and in the field to save lives. And since the beginning, our impact — the scale at which we’re able to help save lives — has grown every single day.
But even after years of growth, Prepared’s AI is still only assisting in 30-40 million calls a year, a fraction of the 240 million 911 calls that happen annually in the U.S. Less than 10% of the impact we know this technology can have.
By joining forces with Axon, public safety in America takes a giant leap forward. Prepared’s mission and adoption will be pulled forward by years. That acceleration is what excites me most — because it means millions of people will get help faster, better, and with more context, sooner.
Every year in the U.S., the scale of emergencies is staggering — and shows what’s at stake:
- 40M+ medical emergencies¹ where context can change patient outcomes.
- 25M+ domestic violence situations² where better insight can prevent escalation.
- 4M+ non-English calls² where Prepared can ensures nothing gets lost in translation.
- 7M+ incidents involving a gun² where officer and civilian safety hinge on real-time information.
- 1M+ cardiac related incidents² where seconds make the difference between life and death.
Each one is a moment where dispatchers can act with confidence, responders arrive with clarity, supervisors can identify gaps, and callers aren’t left alone in the most critical minutes of their lives.
This is why moving faster matters. Every year of acceleration means millions more calls where technology can change the outcome. That’s what makes this next chapter so exciting — not just that we’re joining forces with a company we deeply admire, but that together we get to rewrite the timeline for public safety.
For us, this isn’t just about scale. It’s about making sure the next active fire, the next cardiac arrest, the next domestic violence call gets the perfect response. Not years from now, but today.
Prepared is stepping into something even bigger: Axon’s mission to protect life.
¹ Source: FEMA’s estimate of 40M EMS calls a year.
² Source: calculated using categorization of ~2.5M sampled emergency and non-emergency calls pulled over a 60 day period. Sample set was projected over the 240M FCC estimated 911 calls a year. Sample set my not be representative of all agencies. Actual number may be higher or lower — and numbers are meant to be directionally correct.