disaster response

Zenysis raises $13.3M to scale its big data platform for emergencies across Africa, Asia and South America

Zenysis Technologies, a big data startup headquartered in San Francisco and Cape Town, announced today that it has closed $13.3 million in a Series B round. The financing was led by the Steele Founda

Should we care about the lives of our kids’ kids’ kids’ kids’?

We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here

BreezoMeter, which powers air quality in Apple’s Weather app, launches Wildfire Tracker

BreezoMeter has been on a mission to make environmental health hazard information accessible to as many people as possible. Through its air quality index (AQI) calculations, the Israel-based company c

Paladin publicly launches Knighthawk, a first response drone for cities

Emergency response is a time-sensitive business. When fires burn or a driver crashes their car, seconds can mean the difference between saving lives and watching a situation spiral rapidly out of cont

FloodMapp wants to predict where water goes before it washes away your home

Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year and recovering from them can take years — assuming recovery is po

Following the IPCC’s report, we need more technology to respond to more disasters

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise, as better

RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design

For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support.

SF’s Off the Grid food truck festival refocuses on emergency response and services

Off the Grid is a mainstay of the San Francisco culinary scene. The event company, founded by Matt Cohen in 2010, created neighborhood pop-up festivals centered around entrepreneurial food trucks. It

You can see fires, but now Qwake wants firefighters to see through them

When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will disrupt most

Verizon demos THOR, its new vehicle for frontline rapid humanitarian response

The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat

Startup leaders need to learn how to build companies ready for crisis

It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeh

In a YC ‘power’ play, Gridware girds $5.3M to save humanity from weather

You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping aroun

The human-focused startups of the hellfire

Disasters may not always be man-made, but they are always responded to by humans. There’s a whole panoply of skills and professions required today to respond to even the tiniest emergency, and that

Alphabet’s Loon partners with AT&T to extend coverage globally in case of disasters

Alphabet-owned Loon, the company focused on providing connectivity via high-altitude, stratosphere skimming balloons that can act as on-demand, deployable cell towers, has signed a new agreement with

In the wake of COVID-19, UK puts up £20M in grants to develop resilience tech for critical industries

Most of the world — despite the canaries in the coal mine — was unprepared to cope with the coronavirus outbreak that’s now besieging us. Now, work is starting to get underway both

Jupe is a new startup aiming to address hospital room shortfalls with modular, mobile space

We’re already entering into a healthcare crisis due to the global coronavirus pandemic, and creative solutions to address shortfalls in supplies, protective equipment and more are being develope

Tractable is applying AI to accident and disaster appraisal

“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,&#822

Responding to disaster with IoT and SDN mesh

Communication is always important, but during a disaster it becomes paramount. The internet is the backbone of contemporary communications, from email and Twitter to Instagram and WhatsApp. If we suff

Tweets Can Guide Emergency Responders Almost Immediately After An Earthquake

Aggregated data from sites like Google and Twitter have given researchers new ways to track things ranging from diseases to emergency responses after a disaster. Now Stanford researchers are using twe