From looking your information to scheduling haircuts to supporting emergency response — it’s been a heck of an entrepreneurial journey for Max Keenan and James Liu.
The younger founders simply raised $14 million for Aurelian, a Seattle-based firm that makes use of AI and voice expertise to assist 911 name facilities reply to non-emergency calls.
Their path to Sequence A and product-market-fit has been a crash course in pivots and reinvention.
After graduating from the College of Chicago, Keenan and Liu raised a pre-seed spherical for a corporation referred to as Needl in 2022 and joined the celebrated Y Combinator accelerator.
Needl aimed to construct a private search product to assist folks rapidly discover information, paperwork, or messages inside their digital footprint.
The corporate wasn’t failing. However the co-founders weren’t jazzed in regards to the mission. “We simply didn’t love our clients,” Keenan mentioned.
They sat down and requested themselves: what are we actually making an attempt to do right here?
“Our core framework for what we thought would make us happiest was if we have been working with attention-grabbing tech for individuals who did significant work,” Keenan recalled this week in an interview with GeekWire. “That was the mix we needed.”
So that they went again to the drafting board in 2023 and explored concepts round conversational AI, a expertise that was quickly enhancing because of advances in giant language fashions.
They began experimenting with salon reserving — serving to small companies automate appointment scheduling and worth quotes. “It’s surprisingly a extremely tough drawback,” Keenan mentioned.
However it was a distinct drawback that led the entrepreneurs to 911 name facilities.
Keenan was working with a salon proprietor who talked about her frustration with an extended stretch of vehicles in a college pickup line blocking the parking spots at her enterprise.
“She referred to as the police division’s non-emergency line and doubtless waited 30 or 40 minutes,” Keenan mentioned. Then she hung up and referred to as 911.
“Are you able to make it so the police reply the telephone?” she requested Keenan.
This was removed from their space of experience. However the founders acknowledged a chance to make use of software program to assist modernize a 911 name middle trade that’s scuffling with staffing shortages and has been gradual to undertake new expertise.
“Most are nonetheless working with on-premises software program, and only a few have gone totally into the cloud for his or her core techniques,” Keenan mentioned.
Name facilities join their current telephone traces to Aurelian’s AI assistant, which solutions calls, gathers info, and asks follow-up questions. It might probably totally resolve non-emergency calls (stolen wallets, parking violations, noise complaints) and not using a human dispatcher or re-route to an applicable employee. The tech may deal with language nuance (“theft” vs. “housebreaking”) and obscure location information.
The concept is to assist unlock workers to deal with emergency calls with fast wants whereas additionally lowering wait occasions for non-emergency requests.
Since launching in Might 2024, Aurelian has greater than a dozen businesses throughout the U.S. utilizing its product, together with seven in Washington state.
The expertise is having fast impression. Just some days after Aurelian went reside with Snohomish County, an enormous “bomb cyclone” storm hit the Seattle area.
Aurelian was capable of reply greater than 500 calls about energy outages in a 24-hour span. “We answered each single a type of calls immediately,” Keenan mentioned. One name was from a girl who wanted assist together with her husband’s chair carry that was caught midway up the steps.
“We took that decision, transferred it instantly, and had it answered in 5 seconds as an alternative of an hour,” Keenan mentioned.
Aurelian is on monitor to automate multiple million calls every month.
NEA led the Sequence A spherical, which included participation from a number of of the corporate’s unique buyers — together with Liquid 2 Ventures, Y Combinator, and Palm Drive Capital. “Kudos to the crew for the unimaginable perseverance to search out the most effective use instances for AI that we’ve seen previously few years,” Cameron Borumand, normal accomplice at FUSE, informed GeekWire.
Keenan mentioned he’s discovered to optimize for vitality and pleasure in the case of constructing a enterprise.
“This was the primary time we awoke day by day excited to work with our clients,” he mentioned. “That’s what I listed on greater than something.”
