Deal comes less than a year after Hyper exited stealth.
Toronto- and San Francisco-based Hyper, which uses AI to screen out non-emergency 911 calls, has been acquired by communications tech giant Motorola Solutions.
“This is what pre-seed investing looks like when it works.”
Motorola announced the acquisition on Thursday morning, saying in a release that the deal will expand the use of agentic AI in its own public safety platform, including its Assist offering, which collects and aggregates data from 911 calls. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Assist is already saving public safety agencies hours,” Motorola Solutions executive vice-president and CTO Mahesh Saptharishi said in a statement. He added that, by acquiring Hyper, the company is “further accelerating actions to shrink the gap between the moment a caller dials for help and when help arrives.”
Hyper’s AI voice tool listens to 911 callers, responds to them, and asks follow-up questions in more than 30 languages. Hyper uses that information to route callers to the correct agency or escalate to a human if needed. Hyper claims its system autonomously resolves up to 75 percent of non-emergency calls and can scale to nearly unlimited capacity during surges so that no caller is left waiting.
The AI tool is meant to help understaffed emergency dispatch centres receive only the critical calls that require their assistance, leaving fewer distressed people on hold. According to a 2023 survey of 911 call centres in the United States, one in four dispatcher jobs were left unfilled.
The deal marks a quick turnaround from formation to exit for Hyper’s co-founders, Canadian repeat entrepreneurs Damian McCabe and Ben Sanders. Founded in 2023 out of the Yukon, Hyper emerged from stealth less than a year ago with $6.3 million USD ($8.5 million CAD) in funding. Since then, the startup has onboarded emergency dispatch units across North America to its service, including the Toronto Police Service and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office.
“In just over a year, we went from our first live call … to supporting some of the largest agencies on the continent,” Sanders wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the acquisition.
Sanders, who acted as Hyper’s CEO, previously co-founded Toronto-based FinTech startup Clearco and digital paperwork platform Proof, which Daylight Automation acquired in 2022. McCabe, Hyper’s chief product officer, founded Toronto-based product development service company Connected, which scaled to 200 employees before it was acquired by ThoughtWorks in 2022.
RELATED: AI-powered 911 call screening startup Hyper exits stealth with $6.3 million USD
Hyper was backed by several American venture firms, in addition to Canadian venture firms Ripple Ventures and Trillick Ventures. Ripple managing partner Matt Cohen wrote in a LinkedIn post that the quick turnaround from investment generated strong returns to its limited partners.
“This is what pre-seed investing looks like when it works,” Cohen wrote. “A founder with conviction, a thesis that matched ours, and an outcome that validates everything we believe about backing builders at the earliest stage.”
According to the Globe and Mail, Hyper’s 18 employees, including Sanders and McCabe, will join Motorola. In addition to integrating Hyper, Motorola said in the news release that it plans to roll out specialized AI agents that can understand the context of 911 calls, radio traffic, and other data sources to take emergency actions.
Feature image courtesy Hyper.