Editor’s note: Today's blog features Grant Macwilliam, CTO at AURA and Jeffrey Benning, Business Development Director at Localyse. They share how AURA enriched its safety platform with Google Maps Platform to ensure accurate ETA calculations and reliable global scaling, cutting dispatch costs by over 50%.
Building user trust with a reliable, scalable global maps provider
In an emergency, every second counts. However, because traditional emergency response systems often depend on manual phone calls, localized control centers, and radio dispatches, people can be left in distress without knowing when help will arrive.
At AURA, we aim to solve this problem. Founded in South Africa, our mission is to create a safer world by making emergency response faster, transparent, and accessible anywhere. Our platform accepts emergency signals from sources such as mobile apps, internet-connected panic buttons, wearables, and ride-hailing services, and directly connects people in need to the closest verified private security or medical responder.
To deliver fast response times, we rely on precise geospatial and mapping data. Previously, we used various mapping providers across different regions, but these tools struggled to provide accurate estimated times of arrival (ETAs) that accounted for live traffic and road closures. This created unnecessary anxiety for people in distress, which risked undermining customers’ trust in our platform. What’s more, a lack of regional consistency meant some field responders had a poorer experience than others, with a few even resorting to using Google Maps on their personal phones instead of using the map service we’d deployed in their region.
To support our rapid expansion into global markets such as the UK and the U.S., we needed a primary mapping partner with accurate, consistent real-time traffic data and global scale. Working with Google Maps Platform partner Localyse, we chose Google Maps Platform as the foundation for our service. It gives us the data quality, user familiarity, and global reach we need so that when we tell someone help is on the way, they can trust us to deliver.
Navigating this transition required overcoming unique compliance hurdles, given the inherent complexity and high-risk nature of emergency response. Our Location Intelligence partner, Localyse, provided crucial support and guidance to enable the project to go ahead. Working closely with Google’s product and compliance teams, they ensured all safety and operational requirements were met to pave the way for the agreement.
Clients — including banks, insurers, and ride-hailing companies — can view average response times and incident trends in real time to understand how they’re performing.
Streamlining dispatches and control room operations with Navigation SDK and Places API
We integrated Google Maps Platform across our entire dispatch process. In the field, we embedded the Navigation SDK directly into our partner responder mobile app. Responders get turn-by-turn driving directions, lane guidance, and walking routes without ever leaving our app, helping them respond to an emergency as quickly as possible. Responders find the interface familiar and intuitive, making onboarding simple and ensuring smooth navigation during high-stress calls.
Our automated dispatch engine uses Google Maps Platform directions and ETA calculations to track nearby eligible responders — such as paramedics trained in advanced life support. It automatically calculates distance and driving time to match an incident with the closest responder. In an emergency, this rapid matching is vital: it speeds up physical dispatch and provides the person calling for help with immediate reassurance through an accurate ETA.
We also use Places API and Autocomplete to help users register fixed properties when they sign up for our service, ensuring our system captures addresses with greater precision than our previous map providers. In our 24/7 control room, operators use static and dynamic maps to oversee dispatches in real time. Satellite views allow controllers to see building layouts and property entrances, while controllers use the reverse geocoder to convert latitude and longitude coordinates into human-readable, formatted addresses, helping guide responders directly to the scene.
o provide full operational transparency to our business clients — including banks, insurers, and ride-hailing companies — we transfer dispatch data into BigQuery and visualize performance metrics in Data Studio. Clients can view average response times and incident trends in real time to understand how they’re performing.
Our engineers, meanwhile, have benefited from switching to pre-built software kits from Google Maps Platform, which mean they no longer need to maintain custom native code for different mobile operating systems. This simplifies our technical maintenance and frees our developers to focus on building new safety features.
Reducing dispatch costs by >50% and scaling global protection with Google Maps Platform
Integrating Google Maps Platform delivered immediate operational and financial benefits. By replacing multiple regional services with a single provider, we reduced our cost per dispatch from $0.26 to $0.11 — a reduction of more than 50%. This generates projected annual savings of around $56,000, allowing us to keep emergency response affordable for our partners and end users.
Supported by Google Maps Platform, we process emergency signals every 45 seconds. We manage about 45,000 dispatches per month across more than 1.2 million historical incidents, growing at 13% month-over-month. This global infrastructure helps us scale seamlessly across 26 partner networks worldwide.
As we continue expanding across Europe, the UK, and the U.S., we plan to implement the Isochrones API to map the areas our responders can reach at any given time, based on live traffic. This will help us track our service level agreements and identify areas where we need more responder coverage. Throughout this journey, Localyse continues to be a vital Location Intelligence partner as we scale globally and explore new capabilities like the Destination API for precise building entrance routing to guide responders directly to property doors.
By combining smart technology with reliable navigation data, we’re building a safer, more transparent emergency response network. When someone presses a panic button, they need to be able to trust that help is on its way. With Google Maps Platform we have the accuracy and scale to fulfill that promise for people everywhere.
