Editor's note: This is the fifth and final of Triad Inno's Startups to Watch, a new program that highlights early-stage companies primed for a big year. The feature is a key component of our new Triad Inno platform emphasizing entrepreneurship as a dynamo to move this region forward.
Sneez
Year founded: 2016
No. of employees: Three full-time, several contract and part-time
Top executive: Bill Satterwhite, CEO
Address: 500 W. Fifth St., Suite 400, Winston-Salem 27101
Contact: bill@sneezapp.com
Why watch: The company initially founded to track illness has morphed its applications since Covid-19, including as a means of employees documenting vaccination or testing status. The company is waiting to see if OSHA's vaccine requirement survives legal challenges, but believes there is demand for its services even if courts rule that OSHA does not have the right to require vaccines in the workplace. It the meantime it has also relaunched its original product and created an app aimed at tracking mental health.
In the pandemic, it has been vital to track where you sneeze, and a Winston-Salem startup has been helping people and employers do just that.
Sneez, a startup founded in 2016 by Bill Satterwhite, a local doctor and health lawyer, was created with the intention of tracking illnesses. The startup’s original eponymous product launched late in 2019 as a publicly available, general illness tracking app. A few short months later, Covid-19 took over the world and Sneez transformed its offering to a Covid-19 symptom tracking service known as SneezSafe, available for private clients.
SneezSafe pings people each day to fill out a survey informed by CDC guidelines. Based on a person’s response, SneezSafe’s technology would tell someone whether they needed to see a medical professional for potential Covid-19. A number of employers took up SneezSafe, and Wake Forest University used it for its student population in the 2020-2021 academic year.
In 2021, Sneez focused mostly on SneezSafe, Satterwhite said. The platform was recently modified to allow employees to upload proof of Covid-19 vaccinations and/or weekly Covid-19 testing as the pandemic has also shifted to focus on vaccinations, not just contact and symptom tracing.
Satterwhite, who has been the company’s CEO since November, explained that Sneez is currently waiting to see what will happen with the court challenges to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) vaccine requirement. Even if it is determined that OSHA does not have the right to require vaccines in the workplace, Satterwhite plans to move forward with SneezSafe’s vaccination platform, which is already being used by several clients.
Describing the platform as an “easy, efficient, economical” tool, Satterwhite believes that Wake Forest could use it across the university following a ruling that upholds OSHA’s vaccine requirement. The university only used the symptom-tracking platform on SneezSafe this year for its employees, as students were required to be vaccinated.
Earlier this fall, Sneez also relaunched its original product as a solely web-based product called getsmartnotsick.com. The website allows users to see the severity and risk of a certain illness in their area by inputting their ZIP code.
In addition, Sneez created another web-based symptom tracking app, Zwellbeing. Launched exclusively with Winston-Salem provider CareNet Counseling in March 2021, Zwellbeing was designed around behavioral health, intended for counselors in the workplace to check in on employees. In a similar fashion to SneezSafe, the platform will ping employees with a survey regarding their mental health.
Satterwhite also helped broaden the capabilities of Zwellbeing to not only do symptom checking, but to also inquire about the social determinants of health such as salary and place of work.
To help with growth driven by the pandemic, Sneez has grown to three full-time employees. If SneezSafe is used widely enough for proof of vaccine or testing, Satterwhite foresees needing to hire within the next year.
Satterwhite is not planning on creating any new products in the next year, as he just wants to focus on what Sneez already has.
“We’ve done a great job navigating and surviving Covid-19 in a manner that’s let us emerge, oddly enough, with more products and a stronger offering,” Satterwhite said. “For us, now it’s about sales and scales and pushing out and hoping that Covid-19 doesn’t throw us anymore curveballs.”
Q&A with Bill Satterwhite:
It seems that whether the new platform of SneezSafe, for tracking vaccines and testings, will be widely used depends on the status of OSHA’s requirement. What do you think will happen?
I think [SneezSafe’s vaccine platform] will still exist as a viable product in some form. You have companies that just feel like it’s an appropriate step of worker safety to have something like that. I will say, as a health lawyer as well as a doctor, that OSHA is likely to end up with the power to require something in the workplace. Now, whether it’s vaccines – which is more aggressive, invasive – I don’t know. They already regulate lots of safety things, requiring ear protection and eye protection and closed-toed shoes in all kinds of settings. It’s not hard for me to imagine that OSHA might require testing or masking in certain situations. We’ll be ready to respond to whatever results.
Why was it important to broaden Zwellbeing to inquire about social determinants of health?
Those relate to all the things of life that impact your health. Maybe money is tight, or food is short, whatever your social contexts are. We tend to split and divide how we think about health, as if mental health is unrelated to physical health or vice versa. That’s just not true. Our desire was to create a tool that thinks about the whole person and to direct people to the relevant resources. Many employers have lots of services that few people take advantage of because they don’t know how to get to them. A tool like this can be programmed to get people to the right place for the service that they need.
Do you foresee keeping Sneez in Winston-Salem?
Winston-Salem is now a great ecosystem for startups. We were probably the first startup in Winston Starts and now that is full of entrepreneurs. There’s just a lot more collective energy for startups in the Winston-Salem area than there was even five years ago. It is a good ecosystem. For us, certainly in this health-tech space, it’s very good because of the strong presence of health care with two big health systems and a medical school. There’s a lot of health-centric activity and influence and intellectual capital. We have no plans to go anywhere else.
