Platform technology has introduced something new and different to the market. In another wave of positive disruption, these platform-based businesses are not only making a difference to their industries, but they are also more importantly aiming to bring societal change. Warren Myers, CEO, AURA, South Africa’s leading security and medical response platform, has a vision to create a world where everyone is safe by creating and deploying smart, scalable, disruptive technology.
Through AURA, Myers says that what was created is not just a clever use of technology, but rather the birth of a digital marketplace platform that will assist in ensuring that effective security and medical response are more freely accessible and affordable to all citizens.
“From the outset we wanted to create an environment where our platform would play a positive role in how people live, make money, and how they interact with each other. We also wanted it to offer many new opportunities to those within it and thus, we created the AURA marketplace,” says Myers.
AURA is the first truly smart personal safety platform that provides businesses and their customers with fast, affordable and reliable private armed and medical response. Born out of the critical need for more efficiency within the South African security industry to combat crime faster and more effectively, the disruptive and scalable platform offers customers comprehensive and convenient emergency response while armed and medical response providers get the opportunity to increase their client base.
Innovation had started to thrive, but as a result of Covid-19, it has flourished with new platform-based market disruptions displacing the way it was done before. Myers says that with the AURA digital marketplace platform, the primary objective was to ensure that every citizen has access to security.
“To achieve this, we needed to address not only the security providers, but the greater ecosystem and to tap into what would make this industry more effective. The platform addresses several demand and supply options and embraces digital technology to ensure that the vision of the company in terms of access remains front of mind always.”
The AURA platform is in a sense a hybrid marketplace platform as it converges digital technology with several industries including on-demand emergency services; physical security; medical response; transportation and financial services, including insurance. According to Myers, the brands within the AURA digital marketplace platform are all companies that are thriving digitally, are sustainable, and play to their core strengths to ensure growth.
Lending from a sharing economy methodology, AURA is confident that its digital marketplace platform will continue to gain momentum and positively impact the economy of traditional markets, as well as the newer hybrid approach. To date, the marketplace serves 170-armed response service providers; +-3600 armed response officers; and more than 220 000 active users.
