Michael Chime

In 2012 the school he attended in Chardon, OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry, a blue-collar town outside Cleveland, went into lockdown because of a mass shooter in the next town. He recalled: “I had parents texting me. I had sisters texting me,” adding that it was on the news before the school found out.⁠[1][2]

The Yale Daily News writes that in 2012 his school in Chardon, which it describes as a small rural town outside Cleveland, went into lockdown because of an active shooting in the town over; he said that he knew the mother of one of the students who died in that shooting (the paper puts the number of students killed at six).⁠[3]

In 2021 he said that he grew up in Concord, Ohio, that the shooting itself was in Chardon, Ohio, and that he was about 13 or 14 years old at the time.⁠[4]

On First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry’s podcast he recalled that he grew up in a town right outside the place where there was an active shooter event in 2012; he was not in the school, he said, but knew some of the students “at arm’s length,” and he was acutely aware when going to school that something bad could happen.⁠[5]

He was recruited to play football at Yale University, where he was originally a member of the Grace Hopper College class of 2021, majored in political science and played defensive tackle for the varsity team, Yale FootballYale FootballYale Football (the Yale Bulldogs football team) is Yale University’s varsity American football team, which competes in the Ivy League and plays its home games at the Yale Bowl; in the 2025 season it won the program’s 19th Ivy League championship and the Ivy League’s first victory in the FCS playoffs.Open the full entry.⁠[6][3][2][7]

Yale Football’s 2019 roster lists him as a defensive lineman (DL) and a junior, 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighing 263 pounds; the biography states that he served as a backup defensive tackle in 2017 and as a reserve defensive tackle in 2018, when he saw action in one game.⁠[8]

In 2018 he and his friends began work on the app, his partners being his Yale classmates Neal Soni and Dylan Gleicher; the idea was born one night during an informal discussion in Yale’s Grace Hopper residential college. Soni and Gleicher were in school in Westport at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre; he said: “We thought that this was our generation’s issue.”⁠[1][2]

The Yale Daily News writes that the three began work on Prepared in 2018 after discussing school security technology one night in Grace Hopper College; he said the key was to use the phones everyone carries instead of walkie-talkies and public-address systems: “Our key insight was: Why don’t you just rely on the devices that we all have in our pockets.”⁠[3]

The Yale Daily News wrote in April 2019 that, he said, he first came up with the idea for the app over the summer, when he was concerned about the safety of his 9-year-old brother and his brother in high school at their respective schools; he also said: “I have two younger brothers, and one was scared after a lockdown drill.”⁠[9][10]

David Ulevitch of Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry writes that he started Prepared in his dorm room after a shooting in his hometown; M13’s article writes that the three co-founders grew up near sites of school shootings, including Sandy Hook Elementary. In M13’s article he says: “I was always passionate about the space, even though I didn’t know it would be a company.”⁠[11][12]

Prepared was founded in 2019 by him, Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni, who met at Yale University and later dropped out together; the company began by building a public-safety app for school administrators aimed at school shootings.⁠[13][11]

Prepared’s 2022 announcement states that the company was founded in New Haven in 2019 and that the team grew from a dorm room to an office in New York City; Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni both come from Westport, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and were childhood friends. The announcement also thanks the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Clinic at Yale Law School for legal guidance.⁠[6]

In early April 2019 he and three other Yale students, Dylan Gleicher, Daniel James and Neal Soni, pitched the app, called Prepared, at Startup Yale and won the Miller Prize of the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, worth $25,000; the team was also to take part in a startup accelerator program that included an additional $15,000 Yale investment. He said at the time: “School shootings are an epidemic in this country, and we want to make a difference.”⁠[10][9]

The New Haven Independent writes that their proposal beat MBA students and that the prize brought $25,000, admission to the Tsai Center’s accelerator and help from faculty and alumni.⁠[1][2]

The Yale Daily News writes that he was in the class of 2021, Dylan Gleicher in the class of 2021, Neal Soni in the class of 2022, and Daniel James in the class of 2019. The app had administrator, teacher and student formats; teachers could choose among active-shooter, medical and fire alerts, and an active-shooter alert required holding the button for three seconds while the phone vibrated, to prevent accidental triggers. Location information went to school administrators and 911, administrators could place the school on lockdown, and alerts could reach teachers, administrators and 911 in as little as 15 seconds. The team had studied the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, where the PA alert took 3 minutes 30 seconds and the whole shooting lasted 5 minutes.⁠[9]

At the time the app was being implemented in 22 schools, 18 of them in Daniel James’s home district in LouisianaLouisianaLouisiana is a state in the southern United States on the Gulf of Mexico, bordered by Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas; its capital is Baton Rouge and its largest city is New Orleans. It entered the Union on April 30, 1812, as the 18th state, and had a population of 4,657,757 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and the team had verbal agreements with schools in states such as Louisiana and AlabamaAlabamaAlabama is a U.S. state in the Southeast on the Gulf of Mexico, with its capital at Montgomery. It was admitted to the Union on December 14, 1819, as the 22nd state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 5,024,279 residents.Open the full entry to use it in the coming school year.⁠[9][10]

M13 writes that in July 2020 it invested $500,000 in Prepared’s pre-seed round, the first check Prepared received from an institutional investor, and that it also invested in later rounds. M13’s Karl Alomar met him when Alomar was invited to speak to a Yale MBA class: he walked Alomar to his UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry afterward, and only then did Alomar learn that he was an undergraduate; Alomar had known him for about a year before investing and mentored him as he built the company. Alomar says he “demonstrated that he was the absolute execution guy.”⁠[12]

Prepared’s 2023 announcement, for its part, states that its pre-seed round was raised in late 2020.⁠[14]

In October 2020 New Haven Public Schools signed a one-year, $67,500 trial contract with Prepared; the Covid-19 school shutdown delayed the rollout, which, as of September 2021, was to begin in full in that academic year. The Yale Daily News writes that New Haven school administrators were trained in May.⁠[2][1][3]

On December 30, 2020, the Thiel Foundation named 24 people to the 2020 class of Thiel Fellows, and he was one of them; the announcement states that the program, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people to start companies instead of attending college. The list gives his hometown as Broadview Heights, Ohio, and his project as Prepared, which it says “makes software that provides comprehensive support for educators and law enforcement during emergencies at school.”⁠[15]

The New Haven Independent writes that the fellowship, funded by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, offers students $100,000 over two years to leave college and work full time on ideas that change the world, and that twenty people a year win it. As part of the application-vetting process a camera crew from the Thiel team traveled to Ohio to interview his parents, to whom he had not yet explained exactly what he was applying for; his parents had never finished college and had been pumped about their son graduating from Yale. He recalled that the very first question to his father was what he thought about Michael dropping out, and that his father answered, “I’m devastated”; after the crew left, his parents did some research about the fellowship. The article adds that he said he might return to college at some point.⁠[1]

The Yale Daily News writes that after the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 he applied for the $100,000 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, whose awardees are required to drop out of college, that he soon won it, and that he dropped out of Yale in 2020; he said: “I applied originally as a joke,” and that the application took maybe two hours, and the paper writes that his mother was not happy with the prospect. On First Round Capital’s podcast he said: “My mom hated the idea, but I was like, ‘I’m going to take the year off anyway, might as well get funded,’” and that he fully intended to do the fellowship for a year.⁠[3][5]

NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry Connecticut wrote in November 2021 that the project received the Thiel Fellowship and a $100,000 stipend, which allowed him to leave school that year and focus exclusively on developing the app. David Ulevitch of Andreessen Horowitz writes that he took leave after receiving a Thiel Fellowship to work on Prepared full time; Prepared’s announcement states that he is a Thiel Fellow who went full time on Prepared during his junior year; M13 wrote in 2026 that he left Yale after his third year.⁠[4][11][6][16]

Prepared writes that teachers and administrators using its product asked what happened after their information reached 911, that the team found no clear answer, and that it set out to deliver livestream video, photos and precise GPS data from mobile 911 callers to dispatchers and first responders. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that about a year in, the founders pivoted to 911 call centers, which they saw as a larger market.⁠[6][13]

TechCrunch wrote in 2022 that Prepared dropped its app idea and instead had dispatchers text callers a link to a web app through which they could upload photos and video of the emergency, and that the service had launched about 10 months before the article; Prepared’s 2025 announcement states that its first emergency-response product launched in fall 2021.⁠[17][18]

Reports from September 2021 describe him, at 23, as CEO of Prepared; the company had recently raised $2.1 million in venture capital, worked out of an apartment on Prospect Street in New Haven with eight local and remote workers, and its school app was in use in 200 other school districts across the country, letting users report an emergency within 15 seconds by tapping icons such as fire or active shooter, while principals could check whether reports were corroborated. He said: “it is vitally important to get the right information to the right people quickly.”⁠[2][1]

New Haven’s 911 center was then beta-testing the software Prepared had built for dispatch centers: the city receives about 125,000 to 130,000 911 calls a year, 85 percent of them from cell phones; dispatchers used it two or three times per eight-hour shift, and it located callers more precisely than the standard GPS estimate of about 1,000 feet. Dispatchers could text callers a link to live-stream video, which had helped assess car-crash damage, and a witness had used it to stream an assault on the Green. He said that a dispatcher in Nye County, NevadaNevadaNevada is a state in the western United States bordered by Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California; its capital is Carson City. It was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, as the 36th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,104,614.Open the full entry, had used the app to coach a caller through CPR. He said: “911 is a space that hasn’t changed in 50 years,” and the company planned to expand to hospitals, houses of worship and other institutions that handle emergencies.⁠[2][1]

The Yale Daily News writes that the app was then in use in over 200 schools nationwide, from Sacramento to New Haven, and that schools found it especially useful for communicating protocols during monthly drills; Ashley Castillo, Nye County’s chief dispatcher, said that the unconscious patient was later revived and doing fine. The team planned to expand its 911 software, to connect every building in a city, and to announce opportunities for more cities to adopt the app at a dispatcher conference in Las Vegas on September 27.⁠[3]

In November 2021 he was CEO and co-founder of Prepared, with a team of about 10. He said that hundreds of schools and 15 cities across the country had signed on to use the software; users “press and hold it for three seconds” and confirm their location to make a report, and 911 callers can send live video, pictures and an exact location to a dispatcher through a texted link, a feature that had been used to de-escalate a domestic-violence situation and that, he said, had helped save a life during a CPR event. He said: “At the end of the day, it’s impacting real lives. It’s saving lives.”⁠[4]

On April 6, 2022, Prepared announced a $9.8 million seed round, which it called the second largest ever in public safety; it was led by First Round Capital, Gradient Ventures (GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s AI-focused venture fund), 8VC and industry angels, with returning investor M13 and new investor Risk and Return also taking part in the oversubscribed round, bringing total funding to over $12 million. The money was to go to hiring in customer success, product, engineering and sales, to offering Next Generation 911 features to dispatch centers at no cost, and to industry partnerships; Prepared had joined the RapidSOS Partner Network. The announcement states that Prepared Live customers covered over two million Americans.⁠[6]

The announcement quotes Meka Asonye, a partner at First Round Capital; Karl Alomar, a partner at M13; Ray Kelly, an advisor at Risk and Return and former New York Police Commissioner; and Adrian Fenty, an angel investor and former Mayor of Washington, D.C. The announcement, written in the first person, states: “Most importantly: we are committed to providing this functionality to 911 for FREE,” and “911 has remained unchanged for far too long.”⁠[6]

TechCrunch wrote the same day that the $9.8 million round was led by First Round, with M13, 8VC and Modern Venture Partners among the other investors, and that Prepared had raised more than $11 million in total, including an earlier pre-seed round; 30 cities representing about 2 million citizens had signed up. The service was free for 911 centers, which let it avoid the lengthy government procurement process and spread from one emergency center to the next by word of mouth; he mentioned a possible freemium model and said the company would likely see some revenue that year.⁠[17]

On November 1, 2023, Prepared announced a $16 million Series A led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz, with returning investors Gradient Ventures and M13 participating; total funding passed $30 million, and the capital was to expand the engineering, marketing, sales and product teams. The announcement states that its partner agencies were in 48 states and protected over 75 million people; its core offering, Prepared Live, lets 911 centers receive livestream video, photos and text from callers and remains free, while the paid Prepared OnScene extends data to responders in the field and Prepared Live Enhanced translates texts in over 140 languages.⁠[14][7]

In the announcement he said: “Software has advanced tremendously, transforming nearly every part of our lives. Yet, for our nation’s first responders, their tools have remained largely unchanged for decades.”⁠[14]

David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote the same day that Prepared is “the advanced data layer for 911,” giving callers a web link to stream live video and send pictures, text and GPS location, providing real-time translation in more than 140 languages and AI transcription of calls, and letting operators share incoming data in real time with police, fire and emergency medical responders; nearly 15 percent of all U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry 911 centers used Prepared, collectively serving more than 75 million Americans, and it had spread mainly by word of mouth among neighboring law-enforcement regions.⁠[11]

On September 26, 2024, Prepared announced a $27 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, with returning investors First Round Capital and M13 and new investor NewView Capital, bringing total funding to $57 million. The release states that Prepared worked with nearly 1,000 agencies in 49 states protecting 97 million people, about 30 percent of the U.S. population; its flagship product was the AI-powered assistive 911 platform Prepared Assist, and new features included two-way audio translation for Spanish-language 911 calls and an Emergency SOS Live Video integration with AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry launching with iOS 18.⁠[19]

TechCrunch writes that undisclosed angel investors also took part, that the company had 50 employees based in New York and planned to add 20 more by year-end, and that the platform gave dispatchers a caller’s real-time GPS location, texts and images and, on supported iPhones, video calls, with video, GPS and texting free for 911 centers; a web dashboard provided a running call transcript, with AI extracting details such as addresses and emergency descriptions and translating texts, and the AI features were optional. The article also notes that AI summaries can be wrong and cites a study finding that speech-recognition systems were twice as likely to mistranscribe Black speakers as white speakers. He said: “If we can save even a few seconds on a given 911 call, we want to do that.”⁠[13]

On May 30, 2025, Prepared announced an $80 million Series C led by General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry, with Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital returning and Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry joining as a new investor, bringing total investment to over $130 million. The announcement states that Prepared had more than 1,000 partner agencies in 49 states protecting nearly 100 million people, that its Assistive Call-Taking had been shown to reduce Spanish-language call-processing times by 66 percent, and that its end-to-end platform launched in December 2024. In it he said: “Any 911 call could be someone’s worst moment.”⁠[18]

Mark Crane of General Catalyst wrote the same day that Prepared had handled over 10 million calls, with customers as far apart as Las Vegas and Nashville, and that its products included an AI voice assistant to relieve high-volume non-emergency calls, real-time guidance and automated quality assurance. He writes that even while raising the round, he never sacrificed customer visits and board presentations to prospective agencies, and credits him with a combination of “customer empathy, hustle, and technical acumen.”⁠[20]

M13 wrote in June 2025 that Prepared’s headcount had grown from about 20 the year before to about 100, that it was live in some of the largest U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, Baltimore and Nashville, and that it operated in all states but one; its product line included OnScene for field responders, the premium Prepared Live Enhanced, which adds real-time testing, translation and non-emergency messaging, and Prepared Assist, launched in 2024, which lets dispatchers handle texts and images, get caller GPS locations and communicate in 100 languages.⁠[12]

On September 23, 2025, Axon, the Nasdaq-listed public-safety technology company, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Prepared, subject to customary closing conditions and expected to close in early Q4, with no price disclosed; Morgan, Lewis & BockiusMorgan, Lewis & BockiusMorgan, Lewis & Bockius (Morgan Lewis) is an international law firm headquartered in Philadelphia, founded in 1873 by Charles Eldridge Morgan and Francis Draper Lewis, with practices spanning corporate transactions, litigation, regulatory work and labor and employment; after absorbing hundreds of lawyers from Bingham McCutchen in 2014, it joined the ranks of the ten highest-grossing U.S. law firms.Open the full entry advised Axon and Latham & WatkinsLatham & WatkinsLatham & Watkins is an international law firm founded in Los Angeles in 1934 by Dana Latham and Paul R. Watkins. Starting from tax and labor law, it grew into a full-service firm covering M&A, capital markets, finance, litigation and regulatory work; by 2025 revenue it is the world’s second-highest-grossing law firm.Open the full entry advised Prepared. The release states that Prepared combines call audio, text, video, GPS and real-time translation in a single view and that since its founding in 2019 it had come to partner with over 1,000 agencies in 49 states protecting nearly 100 million people. As Prepared’s CEO he said: “We started Prepared to ensure every emergency call gets the best possible response,” and that together with Axon it could bring the platform to more communities and build new tools faster.⁠[21]

On First Round Capital’s podcast he recalled that during the acquisition negotiations he noticed a spot on his leg that kept getting bigger and was in the hospital for about a week (he also says six days), missing a planned customer meeting in Tulsa and talking about the deal on Zoom from his hospital bed. M13 wrote in 2026 that he dropped out of Yale to build Prepared and that Axon acquired the company seven years later, in 2025.⁠[5][16]

On August 26, 2026, M13 published, in its series The Flywheel, a conversation with him, M13 managing partner Karl Alomar and ProfG Markets host Ed Elson, presenting him as the co-founder and CEO who started Prepared with Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni; the page states that Prepared works with roughly 1,000 agencies and handles about 80 million calls a year, and it mentions that callers who do not speak English can wait five to seven minutes for a translator.⁠[16]

Accounts of his hometown differ: the Thiel Foundation’s 2020 list gives Broadview Heights, Ohio; Yale Football’s 2019 roster gives Cleveland, Ohio; in 2021 he said he grew up in Concord, Ohio; and the Yale Daily News places his school in Chardon, Ohio.⁠[15][8][4][3]

He attended Saint Ignatius for high school, where in his senior season he recorded 82 tackles, 31 tackles for loss and 13.5 sacks, was named an All-State and All-District defensive lineman and the team’s defensive line MVP, and played on a state championship runner-up team; he also wrestled and ran track and field. Yale Football’s biography adds that he has two brothers, Andrew and Nicholas, that he helped with the Wildcats Youth Football Camp, and that his interests include “ethics, politics, and law economics.”⁠[8]

On First Round Capital’s podcast he said that he played on the defensive line and that his football coach was a former NFLNFLThe NFL (National Football League) is a U.S. professional American football league of 32 clubs. Founded in 1920 as the APFA and renamed in 1922, it is organized into the AFC and NFC, with the season culminating in the Super Bowl.Open the full entry quarterback; he used to think that in sports the best players simply win games, he said, and his coaches’ lessons about the team over individual statistics shaped his leadership style.⁠[5]

On the podcast hosted by First Round Capital partner Meka Asonye he said that in its early days the company was turned down many times by customers, investors and parents; before the seed round, after about 100 rejections, he put the company’s chance of success at about 1 percent (in the episode he also speaks of hundreds of rejections).⁠[5]

He said that the first 20 customers were concentrated in Connecticut, recruited by his own calls and visits, a “yellow bubble,” as he put it; the first user tested the product on its non-emergency line, and a very basic version was in the center very quickly. He also said that there are about 6,000 911 centers in the United States but 72,000 police, fire and EMS agencies, and projected that Prepared would process about 30 million calls in 2025.⁠[5]

Prepared: Official website: https://www.prepared911.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]