As hurricane hit Asheville in North Carolina, the city's police department turned to Paladin, a public safety drone startup. And so, Paladin's 30-member team set out over nights and into the weekend to help the police department of Asheville find people and drop supplies there.

The city was a Paladin client; the company could help Asheville with its software because of its capability to control drones remotely from the Houston headquarters of the company, Paladin founder and Chief Executive Officer Divy Shrivastava told TechCrunch. This meant that Paladin's tech made a big difference despite Asheville's closed roads and lack of cell phone or internet service on the ground.

"I think it has painted a very clear picture for me of what the future of the drone industry will look like," Shrivastava said. "We were grateful that Asheville trusted us to help."

While able to help in a natural disaster, Paladin was launched as first responder technology meant to help to reduce the time between a 911 call and help being on the way, Shrivastava said.

Paladin's software is supposed to be generally usable on any drone, Shrivastava said, and pretty easy to use. A Paladin-powered drone is dispatched from its location within 90 seconds when a 911 dispatcher receives a call, with the public safety department able to see what's happening from its office in determining what kind of resources are necessary- if any-to be sent to the scene.

Paladin is also a personal project. When Shrivastava was 17 years old and living in Ohio, his best friend's house caught on fire. The caller dialed 911 in time, but the first responders came a little too late. The house burned down completely, and he never got over it.

I really got obsessed with this problem of not having modern infrastructure for public safety, said Shrivastava. It seemed obvious at that point, the problems were slow response times and lack of situational awareness. A drone has a camera and can bridge the gap in information. You'll be looking at a live feed of exactly what the emergency is.

Shrivastava began incubating the idea in college and then dropped out for the Thiel Fellowship, an incubator program led by Peter Thiel. He officially launched the company in 2018 and started selling in 2021. Since then, the company has secured contracts with dozens of public safety departments, it says, and its revenue is growing nearly double quarter over quarter.

Paladin has also recently raised $5.2 million in a seed round led by Gradient, Google's AI early-stage fund. Khosla Ventures, 1517, and Toyota Ventures are among participants in the round. "The raise will continue building out capabilities of Paladin's software," said Shrivastava. The name "gets out there more.".

But beyond the capital, Aerial also announced new capabilities that its drone software can do. Included in this is the ability of drones to drop off supplies at a 911 call - Narcan or life vests, for instance - and to spot and navigate around other aircraft.

According to Shrivastava, the company has the ability not only to shave off response time between a 911 call and its arrival but also help clear 10-25% of 911 calls that are either false or miscalls where an officer doesn't even need to be dispatched. He clarified that clearing unnecessary calls makes all the difference because many police departments are short on officers and resources.

"The vast majority of departments, they have less than 50 sworn officers," Shrivastava said. "One piece of technology that is making you 25% more efficient is huge. What is perhaps sometimes hard to remember is the majority of the country are extremely small towns with relatively slight resources. These are problems they see every day."

Shrivastava knows what some people will think when they hear Paladin is helping police departments around the country get drones - that they'll be used for surveillance or for general patrolling. He said Paladin was really intentional about its software's use cases and said it's designed to only activate in response to a 911 call.

He added that his drones are also compliant with all the drone regulations in all 50 states and will only start to take video once they have reached their destination.

The use of technology to make public safety work better is becoming more interesting for entrepreneurs these days. Prepared is another startup building in that space with a very similar mission. Prepared is building a system to help 911 dispatchers by giving them a more complete picture of what is happening at the site of the call by way of video. Prepared has raised more than $70 million in venture capital.

Shrivastava said demand is there from public safety departments, and now the startup starts getting multiple inbound requests for the tech a week.

" We are still early in terms of the entire market, " Shrivastava said. " We are in dozens of cities right now and have scaled pretty quickly, but that is less than 0.1% of the market.