A Richmond startup that harnesses technology to provide not just answers but connection is garnering attention outside the commonwealth.
This summer, Richmond-born platform AnswersNow is one of 10 companies nationwide participating in the inaugural round of the MetLife Digital Accelerator, an intensive 13-week program organized in partnership with Techstars that aims to push potentially disruptive technologies to the next level.
Of the 10 companies selected for the accelerator, two come from Richmond, with Buddy, a company that provides on-demand accident insurance to adventurous people, taking part alongside AnswersNow.
As part of Richmond’s growing field of health–focused tech startups, AnswersNow aims to give parents of children with autism support and resources daily.
“From what we’ve heard and what we’ve learned from talking with hundreds, if not thousands, of parents is that support is not always there or readily available,” said Jeff Beck, one of the platform’s co-founders and a therapist by trade.
It was that problem that Beck and co-founder Adam Dreyfus, also the director of the Sarah Dooley Center for Autism at St. Joseph’s Villa, set out to solve two years ago.
AnswersNow acts as a kind of lifeline between parents of children with autism and the clinicians who work with them. Each parent is paired with a clinician who works with their child and can reach out to that person for personalized guidance and support at any time. Depending on the plan the parent selects, the clinician will also check in once or several times per day. Other resources, like tips and strategies, are also available.
So far, about 30 clinicians have signed on to participate in the AnswersNow network, with more being onboarded every week, Beck said.
While parents are not guaranteed an immediate response to every inquiry, they generally hear from their clinician within an hour or so. Early-stage testing, Beck said, revealed that parents were happy with this system, preferring to wait a few hours for a response from someone associated with their case rather than going through the triage process and getting instant aid from a randomly selected clinician.
Besides those tests, AnswersNow has undergone a lengthy period of development since Beck and Dreyfus first formulated the idea. In October 2016, the pair won $1,000 in funding through accelerator Unreasonable Labs. That support and money allowed them to use Slack to create a platform prototype, which they deployed in January 2017. The first pilot was launched in summer 2017, when AnswersNow also went through the Lighthouse Labs accelerator.
So far, the startup has raised about $300,000 from 12 angel investors, as well as an additional $100,000 from Techstars.
For the past few months, AnswersNow has been operating in what Beck called “stealth beta mode,” with about 35 parents using the platform.
“We are just now turning those lights on,” he said, noting that while the app is fully functional (“It no longer feels like a beta” version, he said) and available to interested users, it is not yet being marketed to large groups.
Beck, however, believes the technology AnswersNow has developed is uniquely suited to providing support and resources to parents of children with autism.
The clinicians who work with AnswersNow largely use applied behavior analysis, an approach that Beck said lends itself well to technological applications because of its algorithmic nature.
“In terms of clinical interventions, it’s very black and white, which is what you need essentially to leverage technology,” he said.
And while AnswersNow is built around clinical knowledge and case-specific guidance, perhaps its most important offering is what its technology represents: a way, as Beck said, for parents to connect with “somebody who understood where they were coming from.”
