2020 was a year of problems. Luckily, problem solving is what startup founders do best.
As companies grappled with moving their employees to remote work and people worried about how to connect with one another while staying safe, Atlanta startup founders turned to innovation to ease the year’s troubles.
Some startups changed their business model entirely or released new products while others kicked into gear this year.
Here are 10 startups that either pivoted or launched to help us deal with the pandemic:
Apollo Medco
This startup created the Apollo Medco COVID CleanPass system, which is a machine that can read rapid COVID-19 tests and send the results into a cloud server, which a person can access on their phone within half an hour of taking the test. The machine can read and deliver about 200 test results per hour, CEO Ken Dunwoody said. The startup is awaiting FDA approval on its machine and is also developing its own rapid COVID-19 tests.
BiolQ
This biotech company released an at-home COVID-19 saliva test to help the country increase its testing capacity. The first version tests for COVID-19 while the second version tests for both COVID and the flue at the same time. Those saliva tests were created to brace for the “second wave” of the pandemic, which coincided with the flu season.
Evident
This identification startup, which allows employers and employees to share secure personal information, teamed up with event staffing agency Show Pros to create the Evident Health Status app. The app launched in May to monitor potential COVID-19 exposure through tracking and connections to third-party health care sources. The app is a secure way for employers to see the real-time health information of their employees to help return to work safely.
Gatherly
This virtual conference platform was founded by college students in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X incubator. Gatherly CEO Chris Cherian said he initially had an idea for a 3-D body-scanning application but switched his focus in March when COVID-19 became more global. Gatherly hosted CREATE-X's Demo Day at the end of the incubator as its flagship event, and Cherian said he sees a place for virtual conferencing even after the pandemic.
herdesk
Dana Bakich moved to Atlanta this year and knew she needed a better work-from-home setup, but she couldn’t find a desk that fit her specifications: sustainably built, made in the U.S., easy to assemble and sold by a woman-owned company. So, she decided to make a desk for women like herself who are working from home. Bakich is pursuing crowd funding on iFundWomen for production costs and currently has about $6,000 of her $100,000 goal.
Maptician
This workplace management software startup created a platform to help companies return their employees into the office safely from remote work. Maptician Flex offers an interactive floor plan of workspaces and allows companies to analyze social distancing, create alternate work schedules, provide mobile-accessible seating maps and plan for office contact tracing.
SnapNurse
This medical staffing platform allows health-care facilities to access on-demand nurses and other health-care professionals. SnapNurse went from providing five to 10 nurses to a health-care facility for an elective surgery to deploying 500-1,000 nurses across 25 facilities for a rapid COVID-19 response. CEO Cherie Kloss pivoted the platform to focus on COVID-19 after the market for elective surgeries dropped. That pivoted has sparked a year of explosive growth for the platform.
Sock Fancy
This Atlanta startup has specialized in sock subscriptions for more than seven years but pivoted to create cloth masks in the spring. By the beginning of May, the startup had sold about 80,000 masks and donated a matching 80,000 to essential workers, CEO Stefan Lewinger said. The masks match their socks and come in a mix of classic colors and fun patterns.
Upbeat Music App
UpBeat Music App co-founder Seth Radman saw music teachers struggling to conduct classes remotely, so he and his fellow co-founder Sudarshan Muralidhar founded this software startup to allow musicians to play together while staying apart. The app, now used by metro Atlanta school districts, puts all the people in a music class or ensemble in a virtual room. When it’s time to play a song, each musician hits the record button and plays their part with a backing track, and the app uses an algorithm to line those parts together and play it back to the group.
Vacmobile
Jennifer and Billy Sparks founded this Alpharetta-based startup in April because they knew there would be a need for an easily accessible way for people to show they were vaccinated for COVID-19. The two already saw problems with the way states stored vaccine records, but they sped up the development of the Vacmobile app because of the pandemic. Vacmobile is in beta testing and will first market a business-to-business SaaS license, which would allow entities such as university health centers to keep track of student COVID-19 tests and vaccination records.
