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Product Updates

August 28, 2026

Rescue Intelligence Is Live

Rescue Intelligence is now available in beta, and it meaningfully changes what you can do with an emergency management platform.

We saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between siloed hardware and systems by crating the integration layer that connects your entire safety ecosystem. 

Most safety systems tell you something happened; Rescue Intelligence helps you understand, respond, and get ahead of it, by connecting your emergency infrastructure to the tools and data sources your organization already uses.

A central platform

Rescue Intelligence is built around a single idea: your safety systems should work together. Instead of isolated alerts and siloed data, Rescue Intelligence acts as a central orchestration layer, pulling in information from across your organization and putting it to work.

Live integrations include:

  • Verkada
  • Avigilon
  • Zoom
  • GoTo
  • Slack

Our Genetec integration is coming soon.

Managed AI or Bring Your Own

Rescue Intelligence runs on a managed AI environment built and maintained by Punch Rescue. For enterprise customers who already have their own Anthropic license, you can bring your own API key and run Rescue Intelligence on your own tokens instead.

Apple Watch App, Now Live

Staff can now receive alerts and stay connected during an emergency directly from their Apple Watch. Android smartwatch support is coming soon.

Other AI-Powered Features

Two AI-powered tools are live inside the platform today:

  • AI after-action reports that automatically surface what happened and what could be improved
  • AI mapping that helps administrators determine optimal device placement

Try it Free for One Month

Rescue Intelligence is a paid service, and we’re offering one month free for new accounts during beta, software only.

Contact us to get started

August 14, 2026

Punch Rescue’s Card Platform is now FCC certified.

Radio frequencies are heavily regulated in the US, everything from air traffic control to police dispatch is governed by who can use which frequencies and how. Our Rescue Panic Button Card Platform operates on LoRa, WiFi and BLE technology, which means they fall under that same regulation.

FCC certification is a federal review process confirming a product meets the legal and technical requirements to be sold commercially in the US, including standards for radio emissions. To get certified, we made a series of updates to the product to prove it’s safe, stable, and reliable, and that it doesn’t interfere with other regulated systems.

With certification complete, Punch Rescue’s Card Platform is now approved for commercial sale at scale in the US.

August 3, 2026

Firmware Visibility Across Every Device

We’ve been quietly shipping improvements to the admin experience. Here’s what’s new:

Your dashboard now shows the firmware status of every device at a glance. Up to date or update pending, you can see the state of every card and repeater, along with the date and time of its last update. No more guessing which devices are current.

When a new firmware version is ready, an update banner appears. From there, you can push the latest firmware to your Cards and Repeaters over the air, no collecting devices, no cables.

Keeping devices current matters beyond just maintenance. Some of our newest dashboard and map capabilities only work on the latest firmware, so staying up to date means your team gets every improvement the moment it ships.

Multi-factor authentication for admin accounts

Admins can now enable multi-factor authentication on their accounts, adding a second verification step at login. It’s a straightforward way to make sure your organization’s emergency setup stays in the right hands.

SSO for Enterprise customers

Enterprise customers can now sign in using Single Sign-On, making access management simpler and more secure at scale.

These updates are part of an ongoing effort to make the platform easier to operate and harder to compromise. More improvements are on the way.

July 7, 2026

How Punch Rescue Connects to 911

When someone presses their Rescue Card, here’s how Punch Rescue gets the right information to 911, fast.

Our primary integration: RapidSOS

Our core 911 integration is built on RapidSOS, a network connected to every 911 center in the US, over 6,000 centers, directly into their dispatch systems.

When an alert is triggered, we send the emergency category, the location, who reported it, and the name of the organization, all in real time. As the situation develops and the location changes, we update that too.

There’s also a human in the loop. A monitoring center agent is aware of the emergency and calls the 911 center directly to confirm and communicate the details. This matters because 911 centers still default to phone calls, and a silent alert alone isn’t always enough to guarantee a response.

Real-time maps for first responders

Along with the alert, we send a link to our real-time map. A first responder on the way, or a dispatcher at the center, can pull it up on any device and see all staff locations in real time, find the person who reported the emergency, filter by responders, staff, or visitors, and locate assets like AEDs and fire extinguishers. The map is read-only and expires at the end of the emergency.

For K-12 customers

Dispatch is immediate; there is no confirmation step and no delay. A long press or triple press tied to an active threat sends an active assailant or silent panic alert straight through to the 911 center, and the monitoring center agent calls simultaneously.

For non-K-12 customers

For healthcare, corporate, industrial, and other settings, there’s a validation step before dispatch. It works like this:

  • A 30-second countdown goes to the web and mobile app. Confirm or cancel.
  • If no response, an SMS goes to a designated number. Another 30 seconds to reply.
  • If no response, an automated phone call goes to that same number.
  • If still no response, a live monitoring center agent calls to confirm.
  • If they can’t reach anyone after all of that, they dispatch.

It’s a thorough process that protects against accidental alerts while ensuring help gets through when it’s needed.

Additional 911 integrations

RapidSOS is our primary and most comprehensive integration, but we also support customers using STOPit Notify and SaferWatch, both of which connect to a broad network of 911 centers and emergency agencies.

Our approach to 911 is probably the most comprehensive in our space, and the real-time map access for first responders is something we haven’t seen anyone else provide.

June 23, 2026

Mobile Mode: Emergency Coverage Beyond the Building

The Rescue Card was designed for buildings, but emergencies don’t only happen in buildings.

Mobile Mode is a feature in the Rescue app that extends card functionality off campus. When enabled, a Rescue Card communicates through a nearby smartphone instead of the building’s repeater network, allowing staff to report emergencies and share their real-time location from anywhere.

Mobile Mode is particularly useful for:

  • Field trips, where staff are away from campus with students
  • Mobile health workers moving between locations
  • Any role that regularly takes staff outside the building

How it works

When Mobile Mode is active, pressing the card triggers an alert through the user’s nearby smartphone. Location is shared via the phone, so responders know where the person is even without building infrastructure nearby.

When staff are off the clock and don’t want to risk accidental alerts on personal time, they can simply turn Mobile Mode off; the user controls it.

One card, everywhere

The same card staff wear every day in the building now works beyond it. No extra device, no separate app flow. Just the existing infrastructure extended to wherever the work actually happens.

June 9, 2026

Rescue Intelligence

Most safety platforms are adding AI features: A chatbot here, a generated report there. In most cases, it’s AI added onto systems that weren’t built with ‘intelligence features’ in mind.

The way we’ve architected Rescue Intelligence is different. The data and integration layer has been the foundation underneath everything we’ve built.

What’s already live

Two AI-powered tools are already deployed and in use:

  • AI after-action reports analyze what happened during an emergency and surface what could be done better, automatically, without someone having to piece it together manually.
  • AI mapping helps administrators figure out optimal device placement across their facility, so coverage decisions are informed rather than guesswork.

These are currently running in our platform today.

Where Rescue Intelligence is going

Our roadmap builds toward something more significant: a safety intelligence hub with an agentic workflow engine. 

Think of this as the central nervous system for safety intelligence. Information flows in from across the organization, is automatically connected and analyzed, then used to determine where attention, communication and action should occur.

In practical terms, that means agents working in the background to keep your system healthy, monitoring devices, flagging issues proactively, and taking action before problems become failures. It means custom workflows that combine reliable, rule-based decision making with agents that can interpret unstructured data like audio and video.

We’re bringing on Agent Deployment Engineers to build custom integrations for partners, connecting Rescue Intelligence to third-party systems like video surveillance and access control. Our APIs and webhooks are already built to support this.

The direction we’re building 

Our goal is to give our customers a centralized place where safety intelligence compounds over time. 

  • After-action reports that pull from every data source in the building. 
  • Proactive alerts before a device goes offline. 
  • Agentic workflow engine built that protects all customer data.
  • IoT multi-device data ingestion for comprehensive safety assessments.

The more data that flows into Rescue Intelligence, the more useful it becomes.

Panic buttons with reliable emergency infrastructure.
A Punch Rescue Rescue Card wearable panic button overlaid a green grid graphic and a screenshot of the Rescue Dashboard.
How We Started

In 2017, a young lifeguard at a YMCA of Charlotte branch suffered a seizure while opening the pool alone. She fell into the water and drowned before anyone knew she needed help.

We heard the full story later that year at a conference in Seattle. Our emergency communication platform, PunchAlert, was already deployed at that YMCA, but it couldn’t help. She couldn’t unlock a phone, open an app, or call for assistance.

That tragedy exposed the fundamental constraint: when people need help most, they often can’t use the tools we’ve given them. We spent two days in Seattle with aquatics directors and risk managers, determined to solve what software alone couldn’t. The answer wasn’t another app, it was infrastructure designed for the worst-case scenarios.

Punch Rescue was born from that commitment: wearable devices that work when nothing else can, connected to infrastructure that doesn’t rely on the person in crisis to operate it. From aquatics to K-12 schools and beyond, we’ve remained focused on one principle: protecting the people who matter most, especially when they can’t protect themselves.