Meet the New Companies in Change Catalyst’s Startup Fellows Program
Seattle’s Showcase Companies Show a Diverse Approach to Inclusive Solutions
By Jared Karol
This year we are bringing our Startup Showcase around the country as part of our national tour with Tech Inclusion in emerging and established tech markets. The companies we choose to participate have to meet certain criteria, including that the team must be diverse and the on-stage pitch must be given by an underrepresented founder (e.g. African American, Latinx, Native American, woman, LGBTQIA, veteran, founder over 40, founder with a disability.)
Just a few weeks ago we held a very successful showcase in Seattle at our most recent Tech Inclusion Conference.
We heard from five entrepreneurs who are out to change the world with inspiring ideas and innovative technology. Each one of the entrepreneurs is now in our Change Catalyst Fellows Program, where they will have access to networking, mentorship, education, consulting, and funding opportunities to continuing moving their companies forward.
Here is a little bit about each one of the entrepreneurs and their companies that were showcased in Seattle.
Blue Canoe Learning
Sarah Daniels, CEO and Co-Founder
Blue Canoe is helping non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation, which then gives them new opportunities in their lives and their careers. With cutting edge speech recognition and machine learning, Blue Canoe has created a methodology based on brain science that uses the theory of multiple intelligences and applies it to the problem of speech.
“English is actually a really tough language to learn spoken, because it doesn’t follow rules,” says Sarah. “This is a huge and important problem that we’re working on.” Non-native English speakers often get to fluency in reading, but can’t quite get that same fluency in speaking, and it can affect how they are perceived professionally.
Blue Canoe’s initial target market is companies with employees that have a clear need to improve their pronunciation. The beta version of their app is in the Google Play App Store, and has gotten very positive responses so far.
Invio SourceDrive
Cassie Wallender, Chief Product Officer
Clinical trials are expensive. And this has reverberations beyond financial considerations; innovative treatments are not pursued for small populations for acute conditions, and In the end, real human beings suffer. But what if there was a better way? That’s what the founders of Invio were thinking.
They’ve created a compliant, cloud-based solution for remote clinical trial monitoring, a solution that improves clinical trial data and speed, and reduces costs significantly. “The original source for trial data is stored in three-ring binders,” says Cassie, Chief Product Officer at Invio. This drives up a lot of costs, she says, besides being a manual, tedious process.
Additionally, individuals have to go to each site to check on the data. But not anymore. “Instead of flying the monitors to the data,” says Cassie, “we bring the data to the monitors. This is a massive opportunity to improve all clinical research for everyone.”
NextBillion.org
Siddhant Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO
“Our vision is to empower people with disabilities to reach their full potential by breaking down the barriers and stigma around disabilities,” says Siddhant Mehta. “There are 1.3 billion people with disabilities today — visible ones and invisible ones. And tech companies are struggling to find good talent and are missing out on this pool of untapped potential.”
And that’s where NextBillion.org comes in. They’ve designed a platform where people with invisible and visible disabilities are matched with industry leaders from businesses for a twelve-week personal mentorship program with access to resources, community, and job opportunities.
NextBillion.org gives people with disabilities resources to make them highly employable. “People with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed,” says Siddhant. “And that’s not because of their disabilities, but because of the lack of support structure and isolation in today’s society.” NextBillion.org is aiming to change that narrative.
Bridgecare Finance
Jamee Herbert, Co-Founder
Anyone with kids knows how much child care costs, especially during the first five years of a kid’s life. And the realities of those expenses can dictate major career and lifestyle decisions. But what if they didn’t have to?
That’s the question Jamee Herbert was asking when she co-founded Bridgecare Finance. They refused to accept a narrow set of options for their future. “We set out to build a financial solution for the 1.3 million mothers with children under the age of five who have professional degrees,” she says, “and the millions of other parents and children that are affected by the quality of accessibility to child care.”
BridgeCare Finance is a line of credit with a set repayment plan that allows parents to spread childcare costs out over time, similar to a mortgage or other large expenses. “Bridgecare pays the full tuition on to the provider directly,” Jamee says, “So what was one unaffordable year of bills becomes two affordable years.” Parents really can have it all.
Litesprite
Swatee Surve, Founder & CEO
“I’ve always been passionate about the intersection of technology and healthcare,” says Swatee Surve. In 2011, she started her research in this area. “I observed that individual motivation, not technology, was the key to improving a person’s health.”
And several years later, Lifesprite was born, a video game platform that helps patients proactively manage chronic health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, and cancer. “We empower people to take care of themselves at points of crisis,” says Swatee. “They come to us when a clinician isn’t available.”
Lifesprite acts as a bridge in the patient-clinician relationship, sharing data collected from the platform with clinicians in between patient visits. Lifesprite’s team is made up clinicians, game designers, engineers, and data scientists, and together they are helping patients get better faster, truly making transformative change in their lives.
About Change Catalyst:
Change Catalyst empowers diverse, inclusive and sustainable tech innovation — through events, consulting, research and training.
Our Tech Inclusion programs explore and develop innovative solutions to tech diversity and inclusion.
Our Startup Ecosystem programs help underrepresented entrepreneurs and investors to start, scale and fund worldchanging businesses.
Change Catalyst is a Certified B Corp, winning the “Best for the World” award for community impact in 2014 and “Best in the World” overall in 2015.
The Change Catalyst Team
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