South African emergency response platform RapidDeploy has raised equity funding from Nedbank CIB, the corporate and investment banking division of the Nedbank Group, one of the four largest banking groups in South Africa.
Founded by Steven Raucher and Brett Meyerowitz, RapidDeploy is an open and integrated response platform, transforming first responder communications centres of any size into data-centric organisations.
The platform achieves new levels of situational awareness and reduces response times by seamlessly integrating third-party data, ensuring it is available when, where, and how telecommunicators and first responders need it.
Since moving their headquarters and primary focus to Austin, Texas, in the United States, RapidDeploy has partnered with nine states and numerous local emergency communications centres. Part of its engineering and product teams continue to be based in South Africa, however, and it has now secured South African investors in the shape of Nedbank CIB. The company is in the process of raising additional investment from global firms to help it take its technology to other parts of the world.
“We are honoured that Nedbank has chosen to invest in RapidDeploy,” said Raucher. “As our first South African institutional investor, Nedbank ensures our continued investment in our teams in South Africa and enables us to expand and grow.”
Johann Van Zyl, head of principal and alternative investment at Nedbank CIB, the bank’s decision to invest in RapidDeploy was based on the strong alignment of the company’s innovation-led business model with Nedbank’s policy of investing in world-leading businesses and technologies that can deliver sustainable positive impact.
“At Nedbank, we recognise that there’s far more to technology than just enabling customer engagement or helping to build a business, and the fact that RapidDeploy technology is literally saving lives, means this venture capital technology investment gives good effect to our Nedbank purpose of applying our financial expertise to do good,” he said.
Van Zyl said the investment in RapidDeploy was in keeping with Nedbank’s venture capital mandate to invest in, and partner with, disruptive, category-defining technology companies.
“As an on-balance-sheet investor, our venture capital approach is highly strategic, and we prefer to work closely with our investee companies, so we are looking forward to supporting RapidDeploy’s future growth and expansion as the opportunities present, particularly given that their success and growth will ultimately translate into even more lives saved,” he said.
