Relay CEO already looking toward expansion
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — The chief executive officer of the newest startup to launch from Indianapolis venture studio High Alpha says he wants to go national. Relay Software Inc. provides a platform for citizens to report non-emergency incidents to public service agencies via a mobile app. The company has partnered with several central Indiana agencies and DJ Muller says they’re looking for more partners to help further the platform’s development.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Muller said the platform helps agencies in several ways.
“Many people don’t know that actually in our 911 dispatch centers, over half of the information that’s coming into there is actually non-emergency,” said Muller. “So we were looking at how can we really improve public safety by perhaps offloading some of that non-emergency incidents and getting them directly to law enforcement.”
Relay launched from its beta testing with more than 5,000 users. Public safety agencies in Fishers, Avon and Fortville have been using the service leading up to the launch.
Muller says the service was inspired by a partnership between the city of Fishers and the Fishers Police Department, which ran a pilot to find ways to more easily report non-emergencies. “We looked at that kind of mini success that Fishers had to see if we could develop it into a national platform where anybody could report non-emergency issues directly to law enforcement.”
Muller says in the short-term, the company is looking to partner with more public service agencies and citizen groups find new ways to help use Relay to improve public safety. He says they are also looking to work with private agencies such as concert venues that use private security.
“We really would love to make Relay just kind of a ubiquitous app where if you see something, you just relay it in and it just automatically gets to the proper authorities in the right jurisdictions. Long term goals, I think we really want to be able to, again the public safety vein, make sure that maybe we can even start handling more serious issues in the future.”
Muller adds the company expects to announce plans for public funding rounds later this year.