Kristina Anderson, Carolyn Parent and Shy Pahlevani of LiveSafe. Portrait by Erick Gibson
LiveSafe
The impetus for Rosslyn-based LiveSafe grew from tragedy. A man held up at gunpoint while strangers passed by without helping. A woman lying under a desk in her French class at Virginia Tech, listening as a gunman methodically walked through, row by row, and bracing for her turn to be shot.
LiveSafe, like other applications, sends emergency notifications to users’ smartphones. But it also leverages the power of crowdsourcing to help prevent tragedies and injuries. Shy Pahlevani, the robbery victim, and Kristina Anderson, a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, wanted to make it easy for students on campus to report anything dangerous or suspicious, or call for help.
Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before killing himself as police closed in (Anderson lay bleeding nearby from shots to her back and foot). An investigation afterward showed missed red flags about his behavior.
Carolyn Parent, a former entrepreneur who became president and CEO of LiveSafe a year ago, summarizes the central question that prompted Pahlevani and Anderson to found LiveSafe in 2012:
“How do we prevent these things from happening by enabling people, through their mobile phones, to be able to take action and share information about something safety related?”
Schools—and now businesses, sports teams, shopping malls and other entities—can set up their own LiveSafe system, tailored to their needs. Students, employees or customers then download the app, through which they can report suspicious activity, ask for help and send their location to first responders in the event of a crisis. They can even have a friend or security officer virtually walk them home by watching their GPS signal on a map. Information from the app can be routed to police, security guards, human resources or maintenance offices. Here are some hypotheticals:
• Someone like Anderson who is hiding from a shooter silently texts her location and cry for help to police. Police warn anyone else in the area to shelter in place or stay away.
• A student is making threats on social media and 15 acquaintances send screen shots of those posts to campus police. (Parent cites a case in which this actually happened and officials were able to track down the person making the threats to intervene.)
• A nurse needs to walk home or to her car after a midnight shift. She sends her destination to hospital security, or to friends in her contact list. They can watch her GPS location live, or get a message if she doesn’t arrive in the expected time.
• A student spots a broken door lock on campus and sends a photo to alert campus maintenance to fix it.
• An employee notices an ice slick in the parking lot on his way in to work. A few taps on his phone lets officials know about it before someone falls and breaks a leg.
“You can prevent incidents from happening or prevent them from escalating,” Parent says. The app eliminates barriers such as not knowing who to call, wanting to remain anonymous, or—like many young people—not being accustomed to talking on the phone. Only one-tenth of 1 percent of tips are false positives, she says.
LiveSafe has raised more than $15 million and is currently quadrupling its revenues annually, as hundreds of campuses have signed up. Now the 4-year-old firm is chasing after private-sector clients, from shopping malls to the New York Mets and the San Francisco 49ers.
The company expects to grow from 32 employees to 45 this year. It plans to stay in Arlington because of the ease of commuting for employees, the talent pool and the local lifestyle. “We’re hiring like crazy,” Parent says.