The round signals both the increasing power of private equity in the industry and the enduring attractiveness of the public safety sector to investors.
JMI Equity led the “strategic minority growth investment” for 9-year-old First Due, which works with more than 3,000 local, state, provincial and federal agencies in the U.S. and Canada.
The funding round also included participation from TCV and Serent Capital. Back in 2021, Serent made a minority investment in First Due, one of its first gov tech investments.
First Due clients include the state of Michigan; the city of Charlotte, N.C.; the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District in California; and the U.S. Department of Defense, according to the statement announcing the deal.
Like pretty much all players in the public safety tech space, First Due uses artificial intelligence to bolster its product offerings, which cover such areas as pre-incident planning, scheduling, fire inspections, community engagement, training and command operations.
The new capital will go toward platform development, customer support and service delivery, according to the statement. First Due also plans to hire more employees while continuing to scale, and build more AI capability into its products.
“This new investment strengthens our mission to be the best possible software partner for public safety,” said Andreas Huber, co-founder and CEO of First Due, in the statement. “Building innovative products and serving public safety agencies of all sizes is at the core of our work, and we look forward to growing our existing capabilities to deliver at a much larger scale with JMI’s support.”
The new capital for First Due follows by days a $100 million round for Carbyne, a 10-year-old supplier of technology for emergency communications.
In general, investors continue to view gov tech as a safe area for investment, especially as state and local governments keep upgrading their digital and mobile tools, move past so-called “legacy systems” and migrate their on-premise servers to the cloud, according to Stewart Lynn, partner at Serent.
He told Government Technology that even in this era of high-profile cuts to federal spending, state budgets remain strong, and state and local officials are typically reluctant to gut public safety and emergency services.
As well, AI appears all but certain to augment much of the work done by fire, police and medical personnel — AI is already helping to sort and handle emergency calls, for instance, or help provide real-time data about emergency incidents.
“We are seeing a lot of AI because the stakes are so high and the margin of error is so low,” Lynn said, discussing not only public safety but other vital tasks conducted by public agencies.
