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.
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, paramedics, and even 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?
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.”
A personal reckoning
The path from 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 sub-zero 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.
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 rabbithole 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.
Martin described himself as a “data nerd,” as he showed Fortune the data that a dispatcher receives during the average 911 call, containing the location and a brief overview of the incident. In comparison, Martin showed the first transatlantic telegram sent between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858, a 98-word message. “This data payload is 512 bytes,” Martin said. “That was more data than 911 receives today in the middle of a life and death emergency. It’s comical to think about until you’re reminded of the scale and magnitude of this challenge.”
RapidSOS replaces that lack of data with real-time intelligence that’s on our very bodies or around us at all times: crash detection from wearables, live video from connected cameras, precise GPS coordinates, health profiles from the Red Cross and American Heart Association, and AI-driven hazmat identification, extremely important for recent incidents like the East Palestine train derailment. The goal is not to replace the human dispatcher but to amplify them, Martin said. “The humans of 911 are just heroes in our community,” Martin said, “and we had to figure out how we could support them, to harness all this technology to be like their assistant or their co-pilot.”
It’s already working
The impact of the platform has been documented in a handful of high-profile saves that illustrate what Martin is building. In Edwardsburg, Michigan, a truck veered off a rural road and burst into flames with the driver unconscious and alone inside. RapidSOS transmitted an automatic crash alert from the driver’s wearable device directly to Cass County Dispatch. In 13 seconds, dispatchers verified the incident and sent help. First responders pulled the driver from the burning wreckage before it was fully engulfed.
In Feb. 2025, a hiker became severely hypothermic near the summit of Vermont’s Mount Equinox during a winter storm, incapacitated with a dying phone battery. RapidSOS provided Manchester Dispatch with high-accuracy GPS coordinates that put rescuers within feet of the victim in sub-zero conditions, enabling a grueling multi-agency carry-down operation that saved the hiker’s life.
These are exactly the scenarios Renner says drove his investment. They weren’t just cases like his own, where 150 people were available to respond, but for the lone biker who crashes in the Rockies with no one around for miles.
“That’s what is really important,” Renner said. “You can take your phone, satellite stuff, all these things that can seem bad, like we’re being tracked, but they’re actually really quite important and necessary for information to save your life, especially in remote areas. This is why I’m here, part of the company: to let people know there’s information out there that’s already helping you.”
Renner was pretty candid that he’s not a natural AI user—in fact, he expressed his frustration with AI-generated deepfakes of him being used to defraud donors to his nonprofit, the Renner Foundation, which supports veteran services and disadvantaged youth. “People impersonate me, and it looks great,” Renner told Fortune. “And they’re siphoning money from people who want to help kids,” he said. “There’s no bed for you in a dark place.”
But he draws a sharp line between AI that exploits and AI that protects. “I personally hate AI, but I’m an actor,” Renner said with a smile. “When AI is used as a tool, especially a tool for good like RapidSOS does, this is the most powerful, most magnificent tool. AI and algorithms are used to sell you ads, to sell you things, so they want your money. This is not that. This is: we want AI used to save time, to save lives.”
Renner said that’s exactly why he does see the positive attributes of AI. “What’s my blood type? He’s going to die of hypothermia more than he’s going to die of his eyeballs duct-taped inside his head,” Renner said, recalling his own rescue. “All his information—information, data—in these kinds of situations, it’s so important,” he said.
Working together with someone who’s lived it
Martin says working with Renner was a smart move because he not only has firsthand experience of 911 emergency response, but also is the embodiment of someone working with first responders.
“He has this whole effort now where he’s buying used and retired fire equipment, refurbishing it, and donating it to volunteer agencies,” Martin said. “Working with someone who is so connected to the mission and the purpose of the incredible work of first responders, it’s just been an amazing partnership.”
Renner has been spending time with first responders at events with RapidSOS, and describes his commitment as long-term. “My personal relations with people in emergency services can now be talked about as a pathway with this company, where they use AI as a tool to help our helpers,” he said. “I’ve been involved in emergency services for a very long time. I love them. Some of my best friends are firefighters. Being involved in the community is something I’ve always wanted to do.”
Renner said the opportunity to partner with RapidSOS has allowed him to talk with his friends in a deeper way. “If RapidSOS hadn’t come around, I’d still just be having private conversations with people in emergency services. Now I can really talk about it, because there’s a real pathway for them to be helped.”
“Time is so key, man,” Renner said. “Information is so key to our survival when it’s a life and death situation.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com