To Fight Coronavirus, This City Is Asking 911 Callers To Agree To Self Surveillance
Deniz Çam & Thomas Brewster
Forbes Staff, Cybersecurity
Since March 16, 2020, New Orleans’ 911 communications center has been using Carbyne’s next-gen 911 … [+]
NEW ORLEANS EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS CENTER
On a regular day in New Orleans’ 911 communications center, 45 people answer approximately 2,500 emergency calls. But days are anything but regular right now. Starting on March 16, 2020, emergency responders in the city of New Orleans are adapting to the new normal amidst the coronavirus pandemic by testing out Carbyne, an Israeli startup providing “next-generation 911” tech, founded by 35-year-old entrepreneur Amir Elichai.
These responders are now using a tool built in part by former members of Israel’s military intelligence—Elichai being one—that’s backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is now the company’s chairman, and a small, passive investment from deceased multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Its founder thinks Carbyne’s tech could make the lives of 911 dispatch and healthcare professionals much less chaotic in the Covid-19 crisis. Carbyne relies on callers submitting themselves to self-surveillance via their own mobile phone. Once a caller uses their Android or iPhone to call 911 (85% of emergency calls now come from mobile devices), they receive a text message that asks for permission to get their precise location and access video from their smartphone camera.
Once permitted, Carbyne can not only get more accurate location information directly from a phone, but also see the caller’s surroundings. In the age of coronavirus, Carbyne says that people will be able to get remote screening and be more easily located for testing or treatment, plus it’ll also help emergency responders identify situations where they’ll be at high risk of contagion from the virus—which has already infected more than 190,000 people around the world.
“We were having a crisis in the city of New Orleans,” says Tyrell Morris, the city’s 911 chief. Carbyne contacted Morris on March 12, 2020, and in three days, the company set up its systems at the New Orleans Emergency Communications Center. Morris says Carbyne has allowed his staff to determine the location of a caller more accurately and also “video chat [with] someone to confirm that their symptoms are what they’re reporting.” As of March 16, 2020, 60 people were self-quarantined in New Orleans. Law enforcement, with the help of Carbyne, is keeping track of their symptoms and whether they are staying in their homes. “The goal for us is to limit exposure for first responders to when it’s necessary,” Morris adds.
In New York City, 1,200 miles away, founder and chief executive Elichai is at Carbyne’s headquarters with two co-workers in the Flatiron District. He has told the rest of his team to stay at home. Right now, Elichai is offering the software for free to some of its new customers like Orleans County. If the 911 communications center was to pay, he says, Carbyne would charge them “up to $1,000 per seat per month.”
“Our mission is basically to save lives by minimizing response time and maximizing efficiency,” Elichai says. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, Carbyne’s platform had already attracted customers in 29 counties across the U.S., but since mid-March Elichai has been positioning the app as a help for first responders dealing with the growing pandemic to snag even more customers. New Orleans quickly became the thirtieth. Elichai then found another customer, United Hatzalah, an emergency medical services organization based in Jerusalem. (The Israeli government has gone further in tracking coronavirus victims, though, revealing plans to monitor locations via telecoms companies.)
Carbyne is part of an industry known as “next-generation 911” that has so far been able to transform 30% of the legacy emergency response infrastructure in the U.S., according to Brent Iadarola, vice president of information and communications at research firm Frost and Sullivan. Older systems still rely on telecom communications alone, without data services like video and more accurate location tracking, Iadarola says.
A data-led 911 service could be a boon for America’s Covid-19 response. “In these cases, [Carbyne] will be able to provide that enhanced situational awareness,” Iadarola says, as well as safety for the first responders. Carbyne points out its usefulness in other medical emergencies. In one of the wilder cases, a woman giving birth in a remote village in Mexico last year was being guided through her labor via live video stream, whilst her location was shared with on-ground medics.
Since its founding in 2014, Carbyne has been able to raise over $40 million from investors, including Thiel’s Founders Fund—known best for its investments in surveillance giant Palantir and Facebook, at a valuation Elichai says is over $100 million. It’s not yet profitable. “We are excited about what Carbyne is doing to deal more efficiently with the Covid-19 response and relief efforts,” Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, says in a statement. “Companies like Carbyne with existing products in the market that address critical gaps in our public health infrastructure should be fully leveraged by the government to rapidly deploy capabilities rather than starting from scratch.”
Elichai moved to the U.S. from Israel in 2008 to serve as a security guard for the Israeli consul general. After taking classes at New York University, he moved back to Israel to finish his studies in business and law. Upon graduation, he helped raise money for Israeli startups for a few years.
Then in 2013, he took a date to Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach that went awry when three strangers approached Elichai and his friend and mugged them. “Everything was okay, nothing happened to me or to the girl,” he recalls, but he was disappointed with the Israeli first responders. “I thought to myself: How come still, in the 21st century, when we call emergency services, the action is so bad?”
Shortly after, Elichai founded Reporty, which he later renamed Carbyne, a nod to the strongest material on earth. In 2015, he cold-called former prime minister Barak, now an investor with a penchant for surveillance companies. He was soon joined by Founders Fund partner Stephens and NJF Capital founder Nicole Junkermann, advisors like President George W. Bush’s secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff, ex-commissioner of the Met Police Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, and a roster of Israeli surveillance veterans bulking up the Carbyne team.
With the latter group, Carbyne has risked being associated with the murky world of government snooping, however. One original vice president was Eric Banoun, who in 2014 merged his old business, Circles, a smartphone tracking company, with NSO Group, a $1 billion spyware provider currently being sued by Facebook for attacks on its WhatsApp user base. (NSO Group has asked for more time to respond to Facebook’s claims, but in a recent statement CEO Shalev Hulio told the court that while NSO simply built the smartphone surveillance technology, it didn’t control how exactly customers used it.) Banoun left the company after it moved to the U.S. and is a passive investor, says Elichai.
Until just last year, Carbyne had avoided negative press. Then, in mid-2019, a news report revealed that Barak’s investment in Carbyne was through a limited partnership that was partially financed by Epstein. “None of the founders or the executive management of the company were aware of him investing,” Elichai says. “We never spoke with him, never talked with him, never knew that he was part of anything related to Carbyne.” According to Elichai, the company has been in contact with Epstein’s estate to find a way to buy back the dead financier’s stake in the company, which he says is “about 5%.”
The Epstein association may well prove to be a minor distraction. Since 2017, Carbyne has built up a customer base of 30 American 911 departments and some 20 emergency response units in Mexico as well as 9 in Israel. It also partnered with two major companies in 2019. Last April, the company started working with the network equipment giant Cisco for its hardware, and two months later, announced a collaboration with Google to use Android phones’ location services at emergency command centers across Mexico. In October, Elichai, who sees Carbyne’s main market as the U.S., moved the company headquarters from Israel to New York City.
Such is Carbyne’s growth. There is a big chance it could go public in the next three to five years, Elichai says, speaking to Forbes days before the stock market had its worst day since 1987. “Carbyne is going to be a unicorn and basically the new public safety monster. And this is what we’re trying to build here.”