Startups that are transforming human service systems
Picture this.
A person who has been homeless for over a decade and is physically incapacitated has been waiting for over one year to obtain social security benefits.
A mother and her daughter have been living in their car after their eviction. A program exists to help families in their situation, but they do not know how to even begin to access these services.
A family in foster care has given up on supporting a child in the system as a result of the endless bureaucracy and confusing application and validation process.
These stories are not based in fiction. Instead, they are representative of the broken human service systems that are omnipresent throughout the United States. Like many things in our society, these systems were designed with good intention — to aid the most marginalized and disenfranchised members of our society.
And although these systems do provide the services that they were created for, they are also steeped in stifling bureaucracy and shielded from innovation and progress. Inefficient legacy systems burden front-line staff. Red tape suffocates progress.
Fortunately, businesses have begun to appear within the human services field in an effort to modernize these systems and make them more efficient and humane. Here are some of the startups doing the work:
- Binti (https://binti.com/)
Binti is a for-profit that “is reinventing foster care and adoption, with a mission to increase equality of opportunity in the world by helping every child have a family”(link).
The following paragraph further explains the nature of the business:
“Historically, and in governments not yet partnered with Binti, foster parents had to deal with overwhelming amounts of paperwork, while the social workers, reviewing the adoption applications, had to manually input data into column-intensive spreadsheets. The process was extremely tedious and prone to errors. This is where Binti’s software comes into play, to modernize government operations in the foster care system.”
Binti has raised about $10 million in funding (link)
2. Propel (https://www.joinpropel.com/)
Propel “builds software dedicated to helping low-income Americans improve their financial health” (link).
For example, Propel has as its core product “Fresh EBT, a free smartphone app that allows EBT cardholders to manage their benefits, plan their grocery shopping, and save money on food. Fresh EBT is used by hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country.”
Propel was founded in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York. The company has raised over $18 million dollars.
3. Mini City (https://www.minicityatl.com/)
Mini City “offers tech-enabled cost-saving solutions to government agencies and nonprofits seeking to reduce homelessness” (link).
More specifically, Mini City builds software and other solutions for organizations working with those that are homeless or at-risk of homelessness. For example, Mini City can help streamline the process for obtaining identity documents from months to days. This is a huge issue which I have discussed in my previous articles.
The company has raised about $50,000 publicly and recently won the $50,000 HMCU Startup Prize (link)
4. Healthify (https://www.healthify.us/)
Social determinants of Health (SDOH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age as well as the complex, interrelated social structures and economic systems that shape these conditions (link). For example, these may include economic stability, health care access and quality, and the social and community context (link).
The concept of SDOH is further highlighted in the Time Magazine article which outlines how our zip codes may be the biggest determinant of how long we live (link)
Healthify was founded by five Johns Hopkins graduates in an effort to integrate SDOH into the healthcare system (link). For example, a patient may share with their doctor about their current bout of homelessness. The doctor, in turn, could use the integrated Healthify software to refer the client to agencies that provide services for the homeless.
Healthify was acquired in 2021 by WellSky for an undisclosed amount (link).
5. Recidiviz (https://www.recidiviz.org/)
Recidiviz is a non-profit that helps “criminal justice leaders to get a real-time picture of their system, diagnose issues, and drive meaningful changes” (https://www.recidiviz.org/).
More specifically, they create software for the criminal justice system that pulls data from legacy systems and converts it into a legible, well-designed, human-centered format. This allows leaders in the criminal justice system to set goals and track their progress towards these goals. The non-profit also helps standardize criminal justice system metrics.
Recidiviz was a part of Y-Combinator in the 2019 cohort and has raised over $10 million in funding (link).
6. Mon Ami (https://www.monami.io/)
Mon Ami builds modern technology solutions for senior service providers. The company was founded by two Stanford MBA graduates and began as a service that connected aging adults with students. During COVID, the company pivoted and began partnering with counties to create vaccine support solutions for older adults (link).
The company raised a $3.4 million seed round in 2019 (link).
