As Americans struggle to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of startups all across the country are leveraging their tools, resources, and services to aid medical researchers and businesses in need of immediate assistance. Engine spoke with four entrepreneurs who pivoted their business practices to better support those affected by the ongoing pandemic. This is the first post in a series on startups and entrepreneurs who are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
OpenGrants.io
Folsom, California
OpenGrants is a startup that’s working to provide equitable access to public funding by reducing barriers to access. The company retooled its platform in response to the COVID-19 pandemic so companies in need of immediate support can be matched with available funding and grant opportunities, whether they’re on the local or federal level.
“There are all of these local emergency funds that are popping up all over, but it’s kind of dizzying with the amount of different stuff that’s out there,” said Sedale Turbovsky, CEO of OpenGrants.
OpenGrants’ Emergency Support Portal offers companies free access to the platform in order to locate funding that’s available to them. The startup also partnered with Doberman Emergency Management to provide founders with access to experts who can help them navigate some of the available SBA and FEMA loan opportunities.
“Between Doberman and our resources, we’ve been able to put together a team that can talk to people directly and step in and offer immediate help,” Turbovsky said. “The technology is set up in a way to cut through the noise, and let you know the next steps that you need to take.”
Capice
New Smyrna Beach, Florida
Florida-based AI startup Capice—which uses its deep learning neural network to help companies generate predictive outcomes—recently announced that it would be offering coronavirus researchers free access to its platform in order to quickly analyze data that can be used to combat the virus.
Gordon McDonald, Capice’s CEO, said that the decision came after the White House issued a call to action last month for “the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.”
McDonald said the call was a great opportunity for him to use Capice’s existing deep learning services to help the country’s front-line medical researchers.
“I read the call and thought that this is a chance to help solve a bigger problem, and if they need it and I’ve got it -- and it’s easy to use -- then they can have it for free,” McDonald said.
In a press release announcing the news, McDonald said that researchers who reach out to Capice will have immediate access to the platform’s neutral network, and that the startup’s team of AI data scientists is also offering to assist COVID-19 researchers with their efforts.
JustFix.nyc
New York City, New York
JustFix is a nonprofit startup that uses technology and data to promote housing justice across New York City. The startup works to provide tenants with the data-driven tools they need to fight displacements and advocate for their housing rights.
New York City, which has become an epicenter of the virus, issued an eviction moratorium and closed its housing courts except for virtual-only emergency repair and illegal lockout cases. With all court filings now needing to be done digitally, JustFix has partnered with the housing court system to adapt their existing tools in order to streamline the emergency filing process for tenants.
“It gives tenants the ability to create the filings and have them officially submitted to the courts,” said Georges Clement, JustFix’s Co-Founder and Acting Executive Director. “Tenants in these emergency situations are also able to connect with a lawyer from a legal aid provider that can represent them in this case. We have streamlined that process, and that is also available on our site.”
JustFix has also partnered with Los Angeles-based SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy) to launch norent.org, a website that offers Los Angeleans the tools they need to comply with the state’s requirement for tenants to back up their eviction defences with coronavirus-related reasons.
Clement said the site allows local residents “to compile and send those notices directly to their landlords, and understand what the requirements are for them to protect themselves as tenants right now.”
Pathr
Mountain View, California
Spatial Intelligence platform Pathr uses machine learning to understand how people navigate businesses. Because of the platform’s flexibility—it’s able to work across a variety of different environments to track anonymous location and movement data—Founder and CEO George Shaw saw an opportunity to adapt the service in response to the pandemic.
The startup recently launched a new platform to better address social distance use cases and analytics called SocialDistance.ai. The website uses Pathr’s spatial intelligence tools to better track micro-movement—the granular data that other companies tracking social distancing measures and effectiveness are not able to identify. The goal is to better identify how retailers and other business owners can operate their businesses during and after the pandemic.
“We’re not doctors or virologists or disease experts, but what we’re doing is looking to those experts to learn about viral transmissions, safe distances, and what kind of contact is bad contact so we can bake that into our spatial intelligence models,” Shaw said.
Because most stores are currently closed, the startup has created a simulator environment to allow businesses to identify how people move through their stores so they can be prepared for when they’re open.
“You can’t just let people in a store based on the square footage without knowing the flow of the store,” Shaw said. “If you allow 500 people in there, and all 500 are bottled up in the toilet paper aisle, you’ve created a big problem. If 500 people are spread evenly across your 50,000 square feet, then that’s totally fine.”
