Exclusive: Jeremy Renner bets on the tech that could have saved his life faster. ‘There’s 150 people that are responsible for me not dying’

Jeremy Renner is sitting in his Lake Tahoe kitchen in a black baseball cap and a somehow even darker tee, somberly recounting the details of the now-famed incident that left him clinging to life. On New Year’s Day in 2023, Renner was nearly killed on his Nevada property when his 14,000-pound snowcat pinned him on an icy mountain. The “tragic accident,” as the Reno sheriff would then call it at the time, left the two-time Oscar nominee with over 30 broken bones, a collapsed lung, and a pierced liver that left him in critical but stable condition in intensive care following surgery.

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The 54-year-old, probably most famous for playing the Marvel superhero Hawkeye in eight different appearances, was frank when discussing the incident: If it weren’t for the people rushing to help him that fateful New Year’s Day morning, he may very well have succumbed to his blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries. All paths to his home were blocked (he was initially trying to dig out a family member), and the cascade of emergency responders had to navigate the brutal terrain to keep him alive, from fire departments to paramedics to a Care Flight helicopter, 150 people in total, by Renner’s own count. He spent months recovering, asking a single question: What could he do for the people who saved him?

Renner said he was lucky to have some 150 people, by his count, get him to safety after his 14,000-pound snowcat pinned him down on New Year’s Day in 2023.Courtesy of RapidSOS

The answer, it turns out, is RapidSOS.

Renner has become a partner and investor in the New York–based public safety AI company. It’s his first major public safety partnership since the accident, but he told Fortune it’s not a celebrity endorsement. He described it as a personal mission rooted in the debt he can never fully repay.

“There’s 150 people that are responsible for me not dying,” Renner told Fortune in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. “I’ll always be in debt to them and so thankful for my life. And that’s why I’m a part of this company, because I think it’ll help them do their job more efficiently, better, and that just trickles down into the person that they’re serving in an emergency.”

Jeremy Renner and RapidSOS founder and CEO Michael Martin both spoke with 911 operators across the country to solve for how fragmented the shared information was among emergency services. Courtesy of RapidSOS

A personal reckoning

The path from a near-death experience to tech investor was not a straight line. After recovering, Renner began spending time with the first responders who had come to his aid, from the 911 operator who stayed on the line for 20 minutes not knowing if he would survive, to the Care Flight pilot and the paramedics who stabilized him in subzero conditions.

“I became a client, or a patient, to the emergency services and got a deeper dive into what they do,” Renner said. “The thousands of experiences that they have that are just as harrowing [as his incident]. Every moment, every day. Their job is pretty crazy.”

He said he was struck by how fragmented information-sharing was during his own rescue, a gap he says could cost lives. “No information is passed back and forth anymore in these services where maybe information she does have could be helpful to anybody,” Renner said of the 911 operator who worked his case. “I think all that information kind of needs to be shared, and data is the most important, and when the time is ticking.”

When Renner later learned that many of the same 911 agencies that responded to his emergency had begun adopting RapidSOS technology, the investment decision became clear.

Renner spent the years following his accident learning from the first responders who got him to safety. Courtesy of RapidSOS

Enter RapidSOS

RapidSOS was founded in 2012 by CEO Michael Martin, who built the company out of MIT after a personal brush with the inadequacy of 911 infrastructure. Graduating college and moving to the Big Apple, Martin was walking home late one night when he was mugged and found himself unable to get help easily. That led him down a rabbit hole of how much information actually gets shared, and so he began cold-calling 911 centers, discovering a national system largely unchanged since the 1960s.

“We learned it was a national infrastructure challenge,” Martin told Fortune. “There was no federal funding, no federal oversight. Every small town in America was supposed to figure this stuff out.”

Today, RapidSOS operates what Martin describes as the world’s largest intelligent safety network, one that connects more than 23,500 federal, state, and local agencies with real-time data from smartphones, wearable devices, 25 million connected cars, 450,000 connected buildings, and more than 100 million cameras. Half a million emergencies traverse its infrastructure daily.

Renner spoke with Reno dispatcher Sara Colacurcio, among other first responders, to see what information gets conveyed