Unlocking Africa
Terser Adamu, who is an Africa Business Strategist, International Trade Adviser, and Director at ETK Group, hosts the award-nominated Unlocking Africa Podcast. During each episode he shares his thoughts on how to unlock Africa’s economic potential in the 21st century. This is delivered through engaging and thought-provoking discussions with innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and business leaders who are unlocking Africa’s economic potential. Whether you're a business leader, an aspiring entrepreneur, have a comfortable side hustle, or want to take your business to the next level, each episode is jam-packed with information and insight that will enable you to take immediate action and implement key strategies to successfully launch and grow your business in Africa.
Unlocking Africa
How a South African Startup Is Giving Underserved Communities Access To Instant Emergency-Response Services with Warren Myers
Episode 179 with Warren Myers, CEO and co-founder of AURA, a life-saving technology platform revolutionising emergency response in Africa and globally. Warren is on a mission to make safety accessible to all by building the world’s first global emergency response “clearing house” that instantly connects people in distress to the nearest vetted security or medical responders, anywhere in the world.
Founded in South Africa, AURA is now the continent’s largest network of private emergency responders and has expanded to the UK, Kenya, and recently, the United States. Backed by a €13.5M Series B round co-led by Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund and Partech, AURA is scaling rapidly and embedding its smart response technology into mobile apps, wearables, insurance products, and IoT platforms, reaching over 1.2 million users and securing 200,000+ properties.
Warren shares the challenges of building a tech-driven safety net in Africa, why the U.S. market presents both urgency and opportunity, and how AURA is helping under-resourced public systems by filling the gap with faster, smarter, and more affordable private response.
What We Discuss With Warren
- The personal and systemic challenges that inspired Warren Myers to launch AURA and reimagine emergency response in South Africa.
- How AURA’s smart auto-dispatch platform is making security and medical assistance instantly accessible via mobile, APIs, and IoT devices.
- The importance of democratising access to safety in Africa, and how AURA’s low-cost subscription model reaches underserved populations.
- AURA’s B2B2C partnerships with companies like Uber, Samsung, and FNB to integrate life-saving services into everyday platforms.
- The strategy and significance of AURA’s $14.6M Series B raise to expand into the U.S. and launch a global emergency “clearing house.”
Did you miss my previous episode where I discuss Africa’s Untapped Health Data: Inside the Mission to Transform Africa’s Health Data Economy? Make sure to check it out!
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Connect with Warren:
LinkedIn - Warren Myers and AURA
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Connect with us at www.etkgroup.co.uk or reach out via email at info@etkgroup.co.uk
You're listening to the Unlocking Africa podcast. I started Aura in 2017 in South Africa, mainly because I always say folks could get a taxi or a pizza quicker. They could get help when they're dying and that doesn't make sense. We always say how important innovation is, but if people don't have basic human needs like food, water and safety, they're not going to be thinking about tomorrow. They're going to think about surviving today. We don't have other people sitting all day managing other people. I think that that is a weird thing that's come out of the world where you have your smartest, most expensive people sitting watching other people do their work. And that's how we make sure that everyone who works for Aura, they're common in our core values.
Speaker 01:Stay tuned as we bring you inspiring people who are unlocking Africa's economic potential. You're listening to the Unlocking Africa podcast with your host, Tessa Adamu.
Terser Adamu:Welcome to the Unlocking Africa podcast where we find inspirational people who are doing inspirational things to unlock Africa's economic potential. Today we have Warren Myers, CEO and co-founder at Aura, which is a technology platform making emergency response services more accessible and affordable than ever before. Their latest smart emergency response API is instantly connects those in need to top-tier security and medical responders anytime, anywhere. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the podcast. Warren, how are you? Yeah, good and you? Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you in the podcast today. Where are you calling from? I'm still based in Johannesburg, but I move around quite a bit. Home base is still in Johannesburg. Brilliant, brilliant. So yeah, thank you for joining us today. And as always, I like to get straight into it. So I was hoping you can give us a brief introduction into who Warren Myers is. Well,
Speaker 00:yeah, thanks. I'm an entrepreneur. I've been running companies since I was quite young. This is my third business. Always centered around safety technology. I started Aura in 2017. in South Africa, mainly because I always say people or folks could get a taxi or a pizza quicker. They could get help when they're dying and that doesn't make sense. So we got to work at building this platform, which effectively democratizes access to emergency response services. And I mean, that's who I am. I mean, we can get into the detail of it, but I'm an entrepreneur and I love building impact for people. impactful businesses that leverage this technology to expedite the value proposition.
Speaker 02:Fantastic. As you say, you're an entrepreneur. This is your third business. Most of the businesses you've started have centered around security, safety. So was there a personal experience or some type of insight specifically that led you to founding Aura back in 2017? Yeah. My
Speaker 00:business before Aura was a monitoring company. We'd monitor CCTV cameras live. And we got really good at picking up, you know, real-time crimes in progress. That service was dependent on a quick response. You know, I always say... in safety that technology detects, but humans respond, right? And the idea came, like, why don't we get the closest guy there? Like, never mind what company he's from. Let's just aggregate and platform all the good guys onto one platform and ensure that wherever there's an emergency or wherever there's a crime, the closest guy is sent out there to deal with that. And it worked out really well, you know, in Africa and actually in all emerging markets. In fact, we'll probably get into our business in Europe and America shortly as well. The guys who run private fleets, either security fleets or ambulance fleets, are very area-specific. So they, you know, small to medium-sized businesses that operate in very specific polygons of specific areas. And all Aura has really done is platform them. So we put our technology in their fleets and consolidate them into one force, effectively, that can be offered out to big bases of customers, whether that's through a telecommunications company or an insurer So no matter where your customers are, they are able to click into this service and get help anywhere in the country, whether that's for security emergencies or for medical emergencies.
Speaker 02:You've given us insights into how Aura currently operates. I mean, would you say there's been an evolution from the company in terms of how it operates previously to how it operates now? I
Speaker 00:think the evolution is more about how we use the platform in Europe and America. In Africa, and we're live in East and West Africa, the service is still the same as it originally was envisioned, which is how do we enable anybody to access help when they need help. Um, not just the rich who have private alarm systems, you know, how do we get anyone with a connected device to get help when they need it and really democratize that. And, and that's worked really well. We have over one and a half million monthly active users through a variety of B2B to see a distribution partners. Like I mentioned, those are like companies like Uber and, um, insurance companies and telcos and banks and telematics companies that distribute for us. So you can't go and download and pay for Aura. We're not a B2C business. We're B2B2C. And where we fundamentally changed our go-to-market strategy is when we went into the UK and America now and the businesses there don't service individuals. We service home and business alarm systems companies. because the police will no longer do the response to those properties anymore unless there's a verified crime in progress. So in the UK and America, we don't respond to individuals who have problems. We respond to homes and businesses who alarms have gone off and they require someone to respond out there and verify what's going on. You know, I always say in the UK and America, you can still phone 911 and get decent help. That unfortunately isn't the case in most of emerging markets. Our public sector resources are extremely stretched and therefore, you know, the private responders are what we use to help people in their own personal capacity. In the US and the UK, the gap that we fill there is more in the alarm, the private alarm system space. Does that make sense?
Speaker 02:Yes, 100%.
Speaker 00:I
Speaker 02:mean, you've mentioned the democratization of emergency response and what makes Aura's dispatch and routing, different from traditional emergency responses. So with this, I know it runs through an API that integrates into existing platforms such as WhatsApp and different IoT devices. So how does it do this? Can you walk us through that?
Speaker 00:Yeah, so first of all, the end user is accessing us through their insurer or their telematics company or through their bank or even through a company like Uber. When you have an emergency in Africa and Uber, there's an SOS button that when you press that, that comes through to our platform. And our API pretty much authenticates an active user subscription. And then what it does, it receives the location, the lat long. So we know where you are and who you are. And then on the backend side of our platform, We have technology in all the security and ambulance vehicles that works similar to Uber in that it sends the closest one there to you. So there's no human involved in phoning or radioing or dispatching someone. It's all what we call machine to machine. Someone needs help, they push a button and the closest person who can provide that help immediately responds and is navigated to that customer. So that's how the whole thing kind of works. And that input, that API input can be ingested through WhatsApp. It can be ingested through an app, third-party app like Uber It can be sent from an IoT physical button that can send a location. It can even be dispatched via a control center who's monitoring alarms or cameras. So it's a very versatile and hardware and application agnostic API that really just sends us as aura location to say that someone's either having a security or a medical incident. And whichever incident they're having, we then monitor dispatch that respective network or either send medical emergency responders or security responders.
Speaker 02:I know that one of your goals is to make emergency services affordable for all. So how are you able to reach what you'd call low income or underserved communities in African markets?
Speaker 00:So before Aura to access private security at your home, you'd have to pay somewhere in the region of $30 a month which really was just for the top income brackets. What we've done now is we've democratized that access to about $2 a month, where you can access those services through your phone, via your insurer or via your bank, like I mentioned. That's enabled mid-market income earners to access this help. And what we've done for the very low income brackets is we have some subsidized customers. Some of them are actual governments. So in South Africa, the Khartoum or the Johannesburg government subsidized over 100,000 very at-risk cohorts, mainly gender-based violence victims in townships to have access to this. We also have a couple of funded NGOs that help the very low-income people who are subsidised. And that's how we distribute. So if you can, firstly, we've made it very much cheaper for the average citizen to pay for this, like I said, about $2 or $3 a month, as opposed to $30 or $40. And then for those that really don't know where they need Keep
Speaker 02:into the theme of access. I know one of the biggest challenges to access is not just the affordability, it's also the infrastructure. So what infrastructure challenges have you had to overcome in African markets in order to make the service available? The only
Speaker 00:prerequisite infrastructure we need is cellular connectivity. And look, across Africa, that's moved length and moved massively. There are some blind spots in very rural areas. And that is a limitation for us. We can't provide the service to folks whose phones are not connected to the internet. And that's all we need. We need an internet connection on the customer side and on the responder side. But just so you know, like we service a lot of the telcos in these regions and the percentage of the population that is covered within internet access is 98%. You know, that last 2% is a challenge. It's not economical for the telcos to put down towers in these very rural areas. because there's so little people who live there that would use them. Unfortunately, that is a blind spot for us. But like I said, it is still very outlying. It's a couple of percent.
Speaker 02:As you mentioned, over the years, internet accessibility has increased on the continent, which has enabled you to scale your product. So what lessons have you learned during that period in terms of scaling the product in African cities and rural areas? Um...
Speaker 00:I can really just say maybe for East and West Africa that telecoms companies don't just provide you the connectivity, they're also really strong distribution and billing engines. Yeah.
Unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 00:A lot of the challenge with selling a subscription business is getting folks to opt in onto a wallet or digital or credit card and getting them to pay every month. And a lot of that is handled by telcos in Africa. Most people run their lives or sell their money effectively. On top of them connecting the users to the internet that enables the service, they're also excellent partners at distribution.
Speaker 02:Fantastic. Because I know over the years you've managed to save over 7,500 lives. Are there any specific stories that particularly stick out or stay with you during that time? I
Speaker 00:mean, there's so many, man, like 7,500. It's hard to pick out specific ones. We've saved a very small child that has drowned. We were able to resuscitate them. We've had a situation before where... We responded quick enough to prevent a gang rape. It was a woman who was, you know, had four or five guys getting ready there. And we managed to get there quick enough before anything could happen. You know, it's just terrible what does happen in large places of Africa. Not really just theft crime, but more like very violent crime. And I mean, we deal with dozens a day. So it's hard to really pick out specific issues. But I love the fact that this platform is, really there for the folks that can't really protect themselves or the really at-risk cohort, which is, you know, your gender-based violence victims, small children. You know, I think everyone, it's a basic human right to be safe and feel safe. And I feel like if people don't feel safe, they can't really grow and they can't innovate. You know, and that's why I feel it's so important for Africa because, you We always say how important innovation is, but if people don't have basic human needs like food, water, and safety, they're not going to be thinking about tomorrow. They're going to think about surviving today. And that's why there's such a leap and a head start in Europe and America and parts of Asia and Australia where people have full bellies and they're safe. And they think, okay, well, how can I make tomorrow better? Because today I'm okay. And that's quite a black foundationary problem that you have in emerging markets is that people aren't safe. And if they're not safe, they're going to, worry about today and they're not worrying about tomorrow. And another way of defining worrying about tomorrow is innovating. Very
Speaker 02:true. So, I mean, it's obvious from the success of the platform, there is a need for this product, which has enabled you to raise funding. You've recently gone through a series B raise of $13.5 million. What has this enabled you to do that wasn't previously possible?
Speaker 00:That money is being used mainly to launch America. America is a massive market. It's got a huge cohort of alarm systems that currently point into police when required and the police are just cannot handle the demand that's coming out of the private alarm space, both with regard to call taking as well as getting vehicles out to dispatch. And that's a very obvious gap that we know how to fill and to say, and not to replace police. In fact, we're doing what the police just don't have the resources to do, which is to triage all of these alarm calls. And in fact, in Europe and America, if we ever respond to, the property where there is an incident. We don't engage with the criminals. The police come out really quickly and respond. They're just not willing... to go out to the 99% of the false alarms, which is what we're helping with. So I think we're doing a really great service to these countries where we're actually enabling police to be far more available and ready for serious crimes, as opposed to responding to false alarms that are coming out of the private alarm space. We have a couple other projects where we're enabling our API globally, our global clearinghouse, which is really going to enable any customer which would be, say, app, a wearable platform or any type of staffing solution or travel safety provider who wants to click into one global provider that can get them ambulances and public safety and private guards out in the countries that need them through one API and one service level agreement. So you can imagine a big global customer clicking into Aura and in some regions where they need private will facilitate the private response. But in countries like Sweden or or parts of like Japan, the public response is really good. And we would clear and facilitate the dispatching of law enforcement and government ambulance out in those regions. So we're going to be like, we can really cover you anywhere, wherever your customers are, as opposed to really focusing only on the areas where we have private guard networks. It's now we're going to enable one integration to cover the globe. As you
Speaker 02:mentioned, the funding will enable you to expand into the US. Why would you say now is the right time to expand into the US?
Speaker 00:There already are a number of major cities, about 12, where the police have mandated that they won't respond to unverified alarm calls anymore. And those companies that are monitoring those alarm systems and the customers that are paying for those subscriptions, they expect someone to go out and we are creating a solution for that because as simply put, the police used to go out to verify and now they won't anymore. And the customer expects someone to go out to their home or their business when their arm goes off. We provide access to private guards who go out and fill that gap. So it is fairly, let's say early on, but the scale of the business, just those 12 cities, are 10 times bigger than the total addressable market in the UK. And that's just 12 major cities in America. There's still another 50 tier one and tier two cities over and above the top. So we're taking the bet that the police and cities are going to follow this move with regard to relieving police from doing these false alarms and rather making that a private requirement and really keeping police reserved and available for serious crimes as opposed to doing alarm triage.
Speaker 02:I guess what's exciting is that very rarely do we see African startups scaling and expanding outside of the continent. So what is it that excites you most about building a global brand, a global company?
Speaker 00:Well, the vision of this company is to create a world where everyone is safe. It wasn't an Africa-only vision. That safety is a basic human need anywhere in the world. And so it was always driven by a vision. And I've got to tell you, it's tough work because to raise the money you need, like what we did now, When you're only in Africa and you could really like have a great business in Africa, it's very difficult to attract global money if you're only in Africa. European and American investors tend to not They've really got strong mandates around proving revenue and having customers in Europe and America. That's why before we did this round, one of our key moves was to get the UK going so we could prove that we can use this platform to generate non-African revenue. So that is a challenge. I think it's very difficult to take that step out because even to set up in the UK, you need good capital. I think we just kind of got lucky and we got it right there So again, it came through from that vision. And we do expect like post-America to really, through this global clearinghouse, start servicing customers in South America, across Middle Eastern Africa, large parts of APAC. So that expansion plan will kind of kick off probably in Q4, maybe early next year once America's wind is in the sails.
Speaker 02:So what would you say is some of the biggest operational challenges you face trying to scale across multiple continents? Our biggest
Speaker 00:challenge is always getting response companies on board when we're new. You know, these guys don't know who we are. There's no customers yet, so there's no responses yet. So we have to kind of get them on effectively. We pay them synthetic demand. We pay them retainers until the customers do come on. And that's always a challenge. It's a challenge from just a time and effort point of view, getting them on, as well as you use a lot of capital to pay for their, if I call it availability, until your customers do come on. Because you can't get customers unless you have responders. The challenge is getting responders on when you don't have customers yet.
Speaker 02:Interesting. So how are you specifically tailoring your approach to, I guess, local needs and regulations in the US?
Speaker 00:Every state has got its different licensing, and we've got a team that handle that. But it's quite straightforward. The folks, the companies that we onboard to respond for us have to have the required licensing. Remember, we're a technology platform. We're not a response company, so we don't per se need to be licensed. We just need to ensure that the responders that we do have in each state have the required regulatory licenses. How does
Speaker 02:a typical collaboration work with, say, insurers and law enforcement in the US
Speaker 00:work? So in the US and the UK, we only sell through alarm companies, companies that monitor alarms, whether it be through apps or through physical call centers that used to send the police and now they have the ability to send us. So at this stage, our partnerships with insurers and telcos are really more focused in Africa. We have the end user opting in for the service. In America, our customers are always an alarm company that has, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of alarm signals that they monitor. And in some scenarios where whether they can video verify or know that there's a live incident that's in the police and no problem, but in a lot of scenarios where they can't verify, they use us to go out there and verify what's going on.
Speaker 02:I guess going back to something you mentioned earlier in terms of the company was never intended just to service Africa. It was in terms of servicing the widened needs globally for security. So how would you describe the culture within the company, especially as you scale across different time zones, different continents?
Speaker 00:Yeah, so we, I think the organization is designed to, really centralise what has to be centralised, which is typically finance and tech is centralised, whereas the local teams, they're the ones that handle demand and supply in each region. And that's what we want. The guys who head up each region, they have all the toolkits they need to bring on response companies and bring customers on, and really all the global functions are taken care of. From a culture point of view, we've got a very flat structure here, like anyone in this business can set up a time directly with me Uh, we don't have like hierarchies. I think we don't have managers either. I think managers are a waste of time. Everyone has a report, like some of their report into to help them do their job, but we don't have other people sitting all day managing other people. I think that that is a really a weird thing that's come out of the world where you have your smartest, most expensive people sitting, watching other people do their work. Um, So that's really managed more by systems where there's a strong dashboard and strong reporting systems in the business that make sure that we're tracking KPI as well. And then we also, in order to enable this kind of very autonomous culture, we have very clear core values in our business, which there's six of them and we drill into them every week with the team, which is really the way in which we expect people to behave autonomously, which is like with integrity, being a pathfinder, like all of these core values are ways that we say to people, go and peer your tools, go, be autonomous, but you have to behave and you have to abide by these core values. And no matter what country they're in, it applies to them. And that's how we make sure that everyone who works for Aura is common. They're common in our core values.
Speaker 02:Fantastic. So it's clear that tech is a huge part of the company and has helped us drive it forward. Are there any emerging trends or innovations that you're seeing in the security response space in the continent that you're quite excited about? Not
Speaker 00:really on the response side. I think what's really evolving is the end user side, how they access services are going to fundamentally change over the coming years. I think apps are going to really not completely fall away. I think you'll still use an app to access like entertainment and shopping. But I think Something as simple as panicking, like saying you're in trouble, is something that's going to be The user experience, I think, is going to be far more either biological, so either like your voice or your heart rate, knowing that you're in a trauma event, or being done through an actual agent, an AI agent that understands you're in trouble, or you can vocally prompt that you're having, as opposed to you can imagine you being attacked and then saying, hold on, let me just get to my app. We've always known that that user experience needs to evolve, and it is evolving. I think that we're really excited for that. I don't ideally want anyone to have to open an app to get help. I want them to be able to biologically let us know that they need help, whether it's through their voice or their heart rate or something like that. I think that's quite an exciting next step for us.
Speaker 02:So if we look to the future, what would you say borderless emergency response would look like in the next five to 10 years time?
Speaker 00:Yeah, so it's one single global integration that enables that company's customers or staff to no matter where they are in the world, to get emergency help, effective emergency help, whether that's private response services in countries where the public services are extremely broken or weak, or facilitating the dispatch of public law enforcement or ambulances in countries where they are still really good, like Singapore, Japan, Northern Europe. We don't need to send private responders out if the law enforcement are excellent, right, still. So It's really having one integration and one SLA that we can use to cover anyone, anywhere. Fantastic.
Speaker 02:And how will you, Aura, be hopefully contributing to this boardless emergency response space in the next five to 10 years?
Speaker 00:That service will be live in the next 12 months. where you'll be able to click into one integration through us, and you're either going to get private response, private guards in Africa, parts of LATAM, and we're going to facilitate the dispatching of public services in the other regions where, like I said, the public service is still quick and good. So that's probably about a year away.
Speaker 02:As people, we often have quotes, mantras, proverbs, or affirmations that keep us going when times are challenging or when times are good. Do you have one that you can share with us today? Go big or go home. Very American. Yeah. No, I love that one. There's no time to waste. Go big or go home. Thank you for sharing that with us, Warren. We've come to the end of today's conversation. Great way to end. It's clear that what Aura is doing is very powerful. Your mission to democratize safety, it's not just ambitious, it's very necessary as well. And look forward to seeing how things continue to grow and reshape the emergency response space, not just in Africa, but globally. So fantastic. And thank you for your time. Yeah, excellent, man. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye. Cheers, bro. Bye-bye. Thank you to everyone who has listened and stayed tuned to the podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share or tell a friend about it. You can also rate, review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your podcast. Thank you and see you next week for the Unlocking Africa podcast.
