A Louisville-based startup is building technology to help military veterans cope with life’s changes.
Susan Stroud, a veteran herself and former vice president at Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM), is the founder and CEO of Lifequipt. Lifequipt is a consumer-centric company, which Stroud said works to first understand the veteran experience. What makes it unique is that it starts on a personal level, Stroud said.
Stroud also comes from a military family with some members still actively serving. Her company’s beta mobile app is Transition by Lifequipt, which is free for both iOS and Android. It focuses on service members transitioning to civilian life.
There are more than 140 steps that service members have to complete before leaving the military, Stroud said. This app is meant to simplify the process, by managing and tracking each step.
“Really, no one should have to manage 148 steps themselves,” Stroud said.
Each year more than 200,000 service members are discharged from the military, according to data from the U.S. Department of Defense's SkillBridge.
Jeremy Harrell, CEO of Veteran's Club Inc., said between 27% to 44% of out-processing military personnel struggle with transition. Those service members who are out-processing work with many different departments in the process, including medical, administrative and the like.
A lot of the challenges in transition include translating their military experience into what can be valuable skills on a resume for the workforce, a different structure and routine, and finding doctors.
“It’s a whole different world,” Harrell said. “Although there are some similarities, there’s a lot of things that are different … Those are some of the challenges that we get told about and we talk through and help veterans overcome in order to transition in a way where they can be successful, and they can go on with the rest of their life and in a positive way, but it is a very tough process.”
Going through that transition, service members lives are “turned upside down,” Stroud said, as they lose their current job, clothes, community and insurance.
The idea for the company came when Stroud was considering how to help address veteran suicide. In 2020, 6,146 veterans died by suicide, or an average 16.8 per day, according to statistics from the United States Department of Veteran Affairs.
Solving this problem has transient solutions, Stroud said, and there’s not just one way to fix it.
“I really felt like there was an opportunity to use technology to digitally transform the veteran experience,” Stroud said. “Today the process [of helping veterans] is highly paper based, or individual-person based. There's really no continuity there for the veteran, especially as they move across different organizations who may be working with them.”
Stroud did research with the University of Louisville and the Public Health Department to determine the organization’s problem statement of veteran suicide.
“It’s not about, ‘I have a product, and therefore you’re going to be better.’ That’s not how it goes, not really, for sustainable change,” Stroud.
Stroud’s technology career started at Humana, where she interned during engineering school at UofL. The company supported her education, stint in the military and offered flexibility as she was starting Lifequipt, she said.
At Humana, Stroud was most recently vice president of cloud migration and modernization.
Lifequipt wants to create a holistic solution by helping organizations that help veterans with digital transformation.
“There are a tremendous number of people who are already providing services and need better engagement. They need better retention, they need to understand long-term outcomes associated with the services that they provide,” Stroud said. “Our digital tools, give them some of that capability to be able to understand the efficacy of the programs that they're running, which allows the folks that are at risk already for providing veterans support to be able to continue to provide veteran support in a digital way.”
Lifequipt focuses on mobile applications. Beyond Transition, it is creating other products that will help build community and facilitate programs like coaching or training.
Lifequipt doesn’t have employees, but contracts with other entities to build the technology and offer HR and financial services. Some local partners include 10K Advisors, Judd & Judd PLLC, Shout Media and Mark Farmer with Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs LLP.
The company, which has officers and a director, has not yet launched a formal fundraising round.
Stroud said she knows in the future there will be a need for outside investors to scale the company. She declined to share its total funding to date.
“It really comes down to making sure that we understand what we want from an investor in addition to money,” Stroud said. “… One of the reasons why we created the company not as a charitable operation was so that it could become and be self-funded. It could be self-sustaining, and then it would not need large-scale investment in order to continue the activities we have moving as well as to build the coalitions that are necessary.”
