Amir Elichai Transcript
Clint Betts
Welcome to The CEO.com Show. My name is Clint Betts. Today, we're talking to Amir, who is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Carbyne, a global pioneer in mission-critical technologies and a distinguished member of the Forbes Council. Amir has repeatedly demonstrated his capabilities as a transformational leader, combining business acumen with strong financial discipline, deep operational insights, and organizational management. He is growth focused, results oriented, and a solutions focused leader with a proven history of bringing analytical insights and pragmatic solutions to key business challenges. Amir is also a former Israeli army officer who served in different positions in the special elite forces and in the Intelligence Corps. Andy earned his LLB and BA from IDC. Amir, thank you so much for coming on the show. Honored to have you.
Amir Elichai
Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
Clint Betts
Tell us about Carbyne and how you came to found the company and become the chairman and CEO.
Amir Elichai
As with every tech company, it starts with a need. It was 7:00 PM on the beach in Tel Aviv and I've been robbed by three people. This is a true story. I tried to call for the first time in my life to 9-1-1 to emergency services, and you would probably imagine when you take to emergency services that, they know all about you, and drones will come, and it'll be an amazing experience, but it was exactly the opposite. I had to provide so much information, including my name, mobile number, my exact location, and what is going on, and as you can imagine, when you're stressed in this situation, it's very hard to deliver all this information.
It ended up with me giving the money, and they left. It got three people, and then I thought to myself, "How come that still, in the 21st century, you provide so much information for first responders in order to get a proper response?" And here we are, nine and a half years after, almost 10, raised for this company, $150 million. The fact that we have become the global leader in emergency communication from the cloud means that we are basically bringing citizens and takers dispatchers into the 21st century with advanced technologies, cloud capabilities, AI, and rich data collaboration. It's really like the Uber of 9-1-1, and we are very excited about it.
Clint Betts
The Uber of 9-1-1 is fascinating. You've got something really interesting there.
Amir Elichai
The reason I'm saying that, Clint, is like in Uber, it's one app; you click, the taxi arrives, you jump in, and the driver is telling you, "Amir, how are you today?" They take you to the other location; you get your invoice, and everything is centralized in one platform. When we started a company, we started to investigate why I have so much information on those devices, but when I'm dialing to nine one one, the broken phone that this information passed through from the call to the contact center, to the dispatch center, to the responders in the field, so many different companies fulfilling this gap of this information flow, and it's like a broken phone. You have a lot of data here, and nothing is getting there. We said, "We want to create this the first of its kind ecosystem that will seamlessly deliver information from citizens to responders in a laser speed without the need for the integration between multiple legacy on-prem technologies," and introduced Carbyne.
Clint Betts
This is genius. I actually think this is unbelievably genius. And give us a sense for the success you've had so far.
Amir Elichai
Wow. Today, Carbyne is serving more than a quarter of a billion people, and our capabilities are predominantly in the US. Cities, counties like Miami Dade or Denver, Atlanta, Charleston, New Orleans, Cobb County, and many others, including universities, highway patrols, Department of Transportation, etc. Any entity that has this see something, say something on steroids, can utilize Carbyne. Our capabilities are starting from identify where people are when they call to a number all the way to live stream video with the call taker so they can actually see what is going on and not asking questions moving into language barrier. You can be a Spanish speaker calling to Miami Dade and speaking Spanish. The call taker will automatically, by Carbyne AI, identify this as a Spanish speaker and will see the transcription in English when he speaks English back to the person. The person will hear it in Spanish, and we have it in 40 languages. We have all of those capabilities and more, and we deliver tens of millions of calls every year, really saving lives. We're very proud of it.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's unbelievable. And how has AI transformed what you're building? AI has been around for a long time. We're pretending like it's this brand new thing over the past two to three years, but certainly taken off over the past two to three years. How are you thinking about AI? How are you utilizing AI, and how has it helped the company grow?
Amir Elichai
When we started Carbyne, we realized that one of the big challenges of this industry was that everything is on-prem, and we were pushing for the cloud for so long, and then COVID came, and it accelerated everything, and now everybody wants cloud, everybody wants Carbyne, and it's become a commodity cloud in 9-1-1. The same thing is happening with AI. When we introduced AI to the market two and a half years ago, this was like, "We don't need it, really. We are okay with addressing our KPIs." Staffing challenges are starting now at 9-1-1 because people or agencies are reporting that it's how to recruit, and agencies that we work with are reporting a 25% headcount currently missing to address the 9-1-1 volume of calls. If you don't have the number of people that you need and caller volume is going up, the only way that you can address people waiting in the queue and waiting time going up is with agentic AI that is basically going into the queue and starting to ask questions about, "What are you waiting for, what do you need and how can we help you?"
And starting to prioritize certain things. We have things like if you have a big accident on a highway and now we have a lot of people calling on the same event; we have a technology with AI that can recognize in real-time that a lot of people are calling about the same event. We have transcription, and we know what people are calling about, and we can say, "Are you calling about the red car accident? Are you injured?" If you say no, "Thank you very much, would you like to wait on the line?" Yes, but we're going to put him in a priority queue; if you say yes, we're going to put him in a high-priority queue, et cetera, et cetera. We are doing the same thing with the admin line.
A lot of calls to 9-1-1 are calls about, "Hey, this parking is going to be open today at nine P.M." but this is not an emergency call or, "Can I carry my gun to a specific event?" Yes. We are taking all those calls automatically by identifying that this is not an emergency call. Having agentic AI taking those calls and communicating with the citizens like a human and opening a ticket in certain departments and basically functioning like a human, but making sure that the real emergencies are attended by real people while all the other things that are low priority attended by AI and sophisticated agents that we have built.
Clint Betts
This is the minority report, man. Has anybody ever mentioned that to you? You can figure out crimes even before they happen.
Amir Elichai
That's right. And you would be surprised. And again, as you said, AI is not new. It's every day, and things are progressing so fast now. We hear conversations and reports from our agencies. People are now speaking with the AI agents, and they thank them for being so nice. The quality of the things that you can get these days is unbelievable. But I think this is an amazing use case of AI and how AI is really too good and really saving lives and really forming a very meaningful purpose, we are very excited about it, and I think the future will be even more exciting with the thing that we are going introduce in the future.
Clint Betts
The interesting thing about what you're doing is you're building towards a point where you could push a button. Say you're getting robbed; you could push a button on your phone, the app, all that stuff. It'd be cool if it was just immediately recording everything that was happening, and the AI was interpreting that so that they were like, "This guy's getting robbed right now. We have all of his information. He pushed the button," or whatever. And you really could get to a point where humans aren't even needed except to show up and take out the criminal, which is really interesting.
Amir Elichai
I will tell you more than that. Think about how we're not working only in the US; we're working in places like Colombia and Mexico, and I don't know if you've been in Latin America, but those are pretty crowded countries where traffic can be disastrous, and people can wait for an ambulance for like 45 minutes. It's just stuck in traffic at 5:00 PM. A new concept has been developed for drones as first responders. If we can identify certain events that are not necessarily we need to send first responder to the field, we just need to understand what's going on and communicate remotely with the people on scene.
Those things are happening today. We can launch drones and first responders to an event that can get to every point in my city in two minutes instead of waiting for certain times. In the future, you will be able to understand that someone needs CPR now on the floor, and you're going to have drones with defibrillators that I can with a one-click dispatch to the location. I don't need to wait for an ambulance, and I can save lives. What about like IOT becoming smarter? I have Alexa in my apartment. Alexa is listening to everything and understands what's going on. Someone is broken into my apartment, Alexa will be able to place a call to 9-1-1 because we have the location of the Alexa, the voice of the Alexa and everything can be streamlined automatically. The future is super connected. The emergency will be solved, as you said, with or without humans, but we hope to save as many lives as possible, and we're progressing.
Clint Betts
Dude, you're blowing my mind actually. This is an incredible product. Who are you selling to? Are you selling to local governments, local law enforcement agencies? What is that process like?
Amir Elichai
95% of our customers today are state and local governments, TDs, counties, and cities. Those are the primary buyers of our capabilities. We did started to sell to enterprises or mission-critical like entities like the third-largest railroad company in the US is now utilizing Carbyne solution for a see something, say something approach. You are on the train, you see violence, you call 9-1-1, or you call a dedicated number. They need to know where you are, they need to know what's going on. They need to bridge this information to the security teams on the train. An example, we work with one of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the Olympic Games, cannot mention names, to secure their entire operation, including their VIPs and athletes and all that. Everything was managed by Carbyne. Again, any entity, company, or agency that has this emergency sense or sees something and immediately responds can utilize Carbyne, and we are growing in the US and globally.
Clint Betts
This is actually incredible. When did you start? I'm not sure, but I'm sure I saw that somewhere. How long ago did Carbyne start?
Amir Elichai
Almost 10 years ago.
Clint Betts
And have you raised money? Give us a sense for how you finance the business and thought about raising money and all that.
Amir Elichai
For sure. We raised up to series C, $150 million, investors of Carbyne includes companies like AT&T, Fox Enterprise, Founders Fund, Valor Equity Partners, Hanaco Ventures, GMO, which is a KKR a company.
Clint Betts
These are top-tier VC firms.
Amir Elichai
And also some private investors like the former CIA director, David Petraeus and the Kraft family office and some other folks that invested as a individuals or from their family offices. Yes, we have some very exciting investors. They're helping us a lot to bring our technology to market as well.
Clint Betts
How many employees do you have?
Amir Elichai
Clint Betts
Are you based in the US? Are you based in Israel?
Amir Elichai
No. I'm based in the US. I live in New York for the last six years and I would say 75% of the human resources here with me and then we have the R&D back in Israel.
Clint Betts
Very cool. I have to ask just because given your history and the fact that you were in the IDF, how are you feeling about what's happening at home and what thoughts would you give us who don't have that first hand experience like you have?
Amir Elichai
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I was not part of the recent work. I was here, and we were trying to help promote as much as we could. But generally speaking, as someone who was an officer in the Israeli army in special forces, we are all about peace. Carbyne has investors from the UAE. Investors from different countries that you would not intend. I don't know what you think about 10 years ago; when you think about someone from the UAE investing in an Israeli company, you would say, "Absolutely not." But you're talking about we are like that together today.
And as an Israeli, I can tell you that I would love to have the same relationship with the people who live with our neighbors. I hope that in my generation it'll happen and we will be able to see a real peace with our neighbors. Unfortunately, there are some groups that are, I think, making things a bit more complicated, especially after October 7th, which was something that has not been seen before since the Holocaust. But I believe that with the new administrations and what is going on now, the changes, and the recent one-and-a-half years of war, the future is brighter than it was in the past. And I really hope for peace with the neighbors and that we can all live together for a better future for all.
Clint Betts
I think that's beautifully said and I totally agree with that. What hampers growth? It must be somewhat difficult to sell into these local governments, local police departments, things like that. Just the timeline I imagine is a little bit more drawn out than it would be like going B2B. Give us a sense for some of the challenges that come with growing a company like this.
Amir Elichai
You're spot on, and I think we took a very complicated challenge even within public safety. You can build an over-the-top solution, and you can build a certain niche that will help me with translation or adjust doing video, but Carbyne took on itself to do the mission-critical infrastructure for communication. And it's a real platform that basically replacing the legacy providers and managing the entire flow. It's not easy. And it's not only about the product market feed; it's about the brand market feeds, trust, and credibility. It took us a lot of time to penetrate this market. But once you penetrate it, the fact that the budgets are there and they're spending money on something that you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to give you a Tesla and the price of a legacy car." Say, "Of course, I will take it. Why not?"
It's becoming more and more easier. The network effect is amazing, but you need to survive this journey from zero to one, which is longer than selling to a B2B regular enterprise or SaaS business. Definitely not easy. I can tell you that in these days because of the network effect, the land and expand is much, much faster. And we are seeing conversions from first meeting to close, getting much, much faster like six months from first meeting to close the deal. We are leveraging partners like AT&T Tyler Technologies, Cox Enterprise, and some other big players whose procurement vehicles we are leveraging in order to get into the account and close faster.
Clint Betts
How far away are we from just a total AI law enforcement world where we're all governed by that, obviously overseen by humans, but AI being able to do 98, 99% of the work?
Amir Elichai
I think we're pretty far from a world where AI will be able to do everything for mission-critical communication. I think as happening in the autonomous vehicles, we will have a hybrid mode, which is basically what we're experiencing now. And the hybrid mode means that on the day-to-day regular calls the agents can take the call, can help, but on certain events you will have human to be involved.
And I think this state will be pretty... Let's say for the next couple of years, this will be the state. The reason is that you can sell to early adopters here and there, but when it's going to the larger agencies, or it's becoming something that a lot are using, there are questions about security and privacy and what is happening with my data. And I think there are a lot of things that we will need to address before AI can really take care of all our data and make decisions for us and all that because, at the end of the day, the price of a mistake in our industry is so high, we will need some more time to build the confidence for call takers, dispatchers, directors, to trust AI to do everything for them.
I think it will take time. I think for the next couple of years it'll be in hybrid mode where AI will assist the day-to-day operations and this will be, I would say, probably until 2030. It'll take time.
Clint Betts
That makes sense. Hopefully it takes some time because then you get all sorts of other questions attached to it that need to be figured out. Finally, we end every interview with the same question and that is at CEO.com we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Amir Elichai
Wow, this is a great question. I always laugh about the three people who kidnapped me on the beach; I need to find them and give them some equity in the business because, without them, I would not have thought about building this company if this was a true story. Think about it: this was an event that was not that severe; nothing happened to me. I just had to give them, I don't know, 50 bucks or something like that. And then I went to sit on a friends of mine bar and I said like, "How come that's in the 21st century this is a so bad experience to communicate with emergency services?" At the time, I worked with a second-stream company that dealt with live streaming and rich data collaboration. And I said, "If I had these capabilities in my event, this would be like a slam dunk." I would say they opened my mind to something like that, but I think this probably will be it. And I'll say the cliche: my wife supported me throughout the journey. But it's true.
Clint Betts
You turned a negative into a real, real societal positive, which is incredible. Amir, thank you so much for coming on, seriously honor to have you and let's have you back in as you continue to progress here.
Amir Elichai
Thank you very much, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Edited for readability.