Some of us are wondering when we'll go back to the office. And some of us are already there. The one thing almost everyone has in common is uncertainty about how to do this right.
ReturnSafe, an Austin startup that assists businesses with contact tracing, symptom screening and vaccine programs, has built a business around making the return to work as safe as possible.
While the startup's contact tracing and symptom tracking was perhaps its most valuable offering early in the pandemic, the startup's latest frontier is vaccine management. Late last week, ReturnSafe released its vaccine management product, which lets employees share their vaccination record charts and weave them into ReturnSafe's platform. From there, employers can provide fast paces to vaccinated employees and have a better understanding of workplace safety and liability.
“With the broad availability of vaccinations on the horizon, there is a new challenge of how to manage a hybrid population in the workplace where some employees will be vaccinated and some will have vaccine hesitancy, perhaps even for the next year to two years. A solution to help manage these diverse populations is critical,” ReturnSafe founder and CEO Tarun Nimmagadda said in a news release.
The startup on Tuesday announced it has raised $3.25M in funding led by Fifty Years and Active Capital, a San Antonio-based firm that recently raised a new fund.
Nimmagadda previously founded Mutual Mobile and is also CEO of Ruckit, a construction equipment management platform. He became executive director of CoronaTrace, a Mutual Mobile initiative to bring the tech community together to fight Covid-19, in March, and he launched ReturnSafe in May.
The ReturnSafe platform provides daily symptom checkups, a testing dashboard to log results quickly, quarantine management tools and the newly launched vaccine manager.
"Efforts to mitigate the devastating toll of the pandemic have created additional challenges such as a spike in unemployment and worse educational outcomes,” Seth Bannon, founder of Fifty Years, said in a statement. “ReturnSafe allows us to fire up our economic, education, and entertainment engines while keeping everyone safe. From Sesame Street to the San Antonio Spurs to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society -- world-class organizations are relying on ReturnSafe to bring people back to work safely."
