How Prepared Scaled Emergency Tech with M13, From College Startup to AI-Driven 911 Support

Introduction

Founders often want help from investors who have experience building companies and navigating uncertainty. 

That’s why M13 created Propulsion, our operator-led support and insights system. Averaging 25 years of experience, our partners provide an expertise advantage, filling in executive experience gaps for early-stage companies as they scale.

Through this Q&A series, we aim to share stories of how M13 founders and investors work together to build companies and make smart decisions around product, organizational design, brand and even scaling a founder's leadership abilities. 

First up is Prepared CEO Michael Chime, who co-founded the company in 2019 with Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni while at Yale. The trio grew up near sites of devastating school shootings, including Sandy Hook Elementary, and went on to develop a freemium technology that would serve as a one-touch mobile alert system for schools to navigate emergency situations.

After this early version of Prepared Live came a shift from technology for schools to 911 centers with its OnScene product. They continued to get rapid adoption on Prepared Live and launched a premium version called Prepared Live Enhanced, which includes real-time testing, translation and non-emergency messaging.

Then in 2024, the company launched Prepared Assist that introduced artificial intelligence-powered technology that enables 911 dispatchers across the country to receive and respond to texts and images, process audio, provide insights, get a caller’s real-time GPS location and speak in 100 different languages. 

And M13 has been alongside the company the whole time. M13 was Prepared’s first institutional investor check, with a $500K check in its pre-seed round in July 2020, and participated in subsequent rounds.

2019: Founded at Yale by Michael Chime, Dylan Gleicher, Neal Soni
2020: $500K pre-seed from M13
2021: Launched Prepared Live, first 911-focused product
2023: Expanded to field responders with Prepared OnScene product
2024: Series B ($27M) led by a16Z
2024: Launched Prepared Assist, AI for emergency services
2025: Series C ($80M) led by General Catalyst

This article has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The founder story: from Yale to 911 public safety

Christine Hall: Along with wanting to help schools proactively address emergencies, what was your motivation for starting Prepared?

Michael Chime: I was always passionate about the space, even though I didn't know it would be a company. Two classmates joined me as co-founders, and we built a simple app that schools would use in emergencies. The idea was instead of using a walkie-talkie, why not use your phone? It's a much better, faster means of communication. A couple hundred schools across the country launched that platform.

Hall: What attracted you to the founders? 

Alomar: I was invited to Yale to speak to an MBA class. I talked about how to scale culture in an organization, and how you scale a business. At the end of the class, a lot of different students asked me questions, and Mike offered to walk me to my Uber. I didn't know that Mike was an undergrad. He told me what he experienced as a child, how that had affected him/ He shared the original idea for a school emergency application. It was a really impassioned and virtuous concept. 

We got along really well in those five minutes. I loved the idea and understood the pain that he was trying to solve and doing business for the good of humanity. It did not feel like an investable business at that time but I offered Mike a mentorship-type supporting voice to lean on as he navigated what and how he was trying to build.

I'd known Mike for a year before we invested. We started speaking every few weeks. I would say, "Hey, this is the next thing you would probably need to do.” 

A month would go by, and he’d say, ‘Okay, I did it. What's next?’ He demonstrated that he was the absolute execution guy. He knew how to get things done. I knew Mike was going to be a big, backable founder, and that is someone I wanted to work with. M13 put in some of the first dollars. 

Product evolution: from schools to public safety systems

Chime: In the early days in talking with schools, they said they would love to be able to share the emergency information they have with 911, and how they might do that. However, they can't verbalize the data as it was things like pictures, videos and text. You realize the systems are built on the assumption the calls are from landlines, so it became this passion point for us to try to improve those systems because they seemed really important to society.

Karl Alomar: As COO in the early days of DigitalOcean, we were able to recognize the market pull for an offering that built tremendous organic demand. Similarly for Prepared, there was a very, very big play around everything that happens through public safety that needs to be modernized, using AI to drive that. 

The administrative load that lives in 911 is hugely constrained by lack of resources. What Prepared is doing is utilizing AI for emergency services to facilitate a significant amount of that administrative load and make sure that it becomes more fluid and easier to handle, increases accuracy, increases a lot of detail that gets lost in translation in a traditional 911 sense and also creates the audit trail and the information tracking that theoretically will become a great data hub for all the things emergency oriented. 

M13 mentorship that scaled with the company  

Hall: Karl, how would you describe your relationship with Mike?

Alomar: We have grown very close from a business perspective. 

Where I think I've been helpful is in discussing critical strategic points of the business as they think about and innovate towards what to build and navigate the path. What's the road from the end of that, what are the steps in the process, how do we turn an amazing concept into reality? 

That's how I think the dynamic works between us, and we tend to be on the same page.

Chime: The path has certainly been a winding road. In the early days, it was idea validation, and is this the right thing? Should we do it? The sequencing really matters. Quickly it shifted to ‘It's clear, there's something here. How do I start building a company?’ For example, last year we were at 20 people. Today, we hit 100, and it continues even to scale past that, and we're going to have to grow much more this year to hit targets for next year. And that’s Karl's experience. 

Decision frameworks and operational mechanics at inflection points

Hall: Mike, how do you feel like Karl has shaped the way that you've grown the company?

Chime: The best investors I've worked with have been useful in seeing around corners that we haven't hit yet. That could be an idea of how the company could be bigger. Or a specific execution challenge, like hiring for this role as the company scales, and not that one. 

Karl has been helpful in all the phases, both thinking about the strategy and the sequencing of the things we've prioritized from his experience, and then very tactically, how do you build a company around this idea that's starting to work.

Telescope, microscope: strategic insights and operational mechanics at inflection points

Alomar: The problem sets get bigger. They're a bigger set of challenges you're trying to solve, like individual validation points and problem sets at the beginning. Now, the decisions Mike is making are big brushstroke decisions around like product direction, customer direction, bigger swoops on how we're going to address a larger market and geography. Mike's actually handling it really, really well, and has been building an incredible team of people and giving them a good amount of autonomy in the process. I'm hopefully a voice on his shoulder, helping him think about, as we talk about organizational structure, responsibility, roles and decision-making, to navigate where he needs to sit in the organization to be the most effective as the organization grows. 

I am honestly blessed with M13’s Propulsion operator platform. The team takes a very proactive role with Mike and his team to help fill in gaps and navigate specific strategies and execution. 

Propulsion has expertise ranging widely from organizational scale and finance management all the way to data infrastructure, revops instrumentation and KPI measurements. This enables us to be even more helpful as an investor and partner for Mike.

An early, additive investor relationship and national expansion

Hall: Now that you are in the Series C portion of your journey, what kind of support are you looking for from M13? 

Chime: I actually think I'll lean on Karl more. This is maybe a unique thing about Karl, but certain investors don't scale as the company gets larger and larger. And that's on purpose, right? They have specific focuses or points in time where they're really good. The challenge of that is finding context from that stage that is useful in answering the next series of questions around scale. 

If you can, find somebody like Karl, who has seen the movie since literally the beginning. Karl has run big companies so he knows what a 300-400 person company looks like. He'll help me scale in a way that's unique to match that new challenge.

Hall: Speaking of growth, Mike, how do you want to grow the company? Is it more on the technology side, more like on the location side with expanding out and geographically, or some of both?

Chime: Both of those are true, for sure. There's a ton of opportunity, and it's one of the best times ever to be a builder. The technology landscape is at a real inflection point. AI is rallied around this point, so there's a lot of opportunities in our core markets to introduce new applications and new features that help people do what they do best in the emergency process. There's also a lot of building to be done on the core product, but we're scaling it across the country extremely rapidly. There's only one state — I won't name them — that we're not in today, and I hope over the next six months that will change. We saw a really exciting last 20 months of growth with some of the largest cities in the country starting to adopt our tool in places like Las Vegas, Baltimore and Nashville.

In summary

Prepared is a generational example of how AI can serve public good. With M13’s operator-first support and Karl’s mentorship, Prepared’s co-founders scaled from a student idea to a Series C company modernizing 911 systems nationwide. Their story shows how the right investor partnership contributes to sequencing guidance and operational expertise that help startups navigate complexity and scale purposefully.