Could this AI app change our approach to women’s safety?

Every two minutes in the US, a person is sexually assaulted – a statistic that translates into life-long trauma for hundreds of thousands of victims.

As many as one in five women in the US has been raped in their lifetime, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and more than 19 million women reported having been stalked.

No one exactly knows how big the problem is on college campuses, but one recent survey by the Association of American Universities found that around 20 per cent of female undergraduates are victims of sexual assault or sexual misconduct at some point during their college life.

MySideKick, an app developed by the New York-based tech start-up Every Two Minutes, aims to address the safety of women, LGBTQ+ communities and vulnerable populations on college campuses and in urban environments.

Here, co-founder and CEO, Erin Rose, tells us more about the personal security system, its features and how it could revolutionise women’s safety and fight campus rape culture.

Can you tell us a bit more about your background?

My degree is in telecommunications from Michigan State University.

I have over 16 years of expertise building social media followings and online community building, sales, advertising, marketing, branding, driving customer acquisition and loyalty, and guiding product development strategy toward customer needs.

My co-founder and Every Two Minutes CTO, Peter Dolch, is a veteran entrepreneur and has built numerous technology platforms for both start-ups and global enterprises. He has helped launch dozens of start-ups, some of which have gone on to successful exits and IPOs. 

What inspired you to create Every Two Minutes? 

My passion for combating violence motivated by bias runs in the family. My father has a black belt in jiu-jitsu and created a self-defence programme for women based on the martial art in the early-1980’s. His VHS tape was nationally distributed and thousands of women attended his seminars.

I grew up acutely aware that the overwhelming responsibility to stay safe fell upon the shoulders of potential victims. No one at the time was tackling cultural change or getting to the real root of this problem. 

Self-defence is not the way to stop violence motivated by bias in its tracks. Those were the analog days. We had limited resources and research at our disposal.

I founded Every Two Minutes because I know we can leverage next-generation technology to tackle the rise in violence and make the world safer. 

How would you describe Every Two Minutes in a few words?

Our mobile app, MySideKick, is an AI-enabled comprehensive suite of safety tools that are specifically designed to address the safety concerns of women, LGBTQ+ and vulnerable persons.

MySideKick is like a home security system, but for a person. It’s a personalised AI technology that travels with you to keep you safe morning, day and night.

What makes Every Two Minutes different from other apps?

We make it personal: MySideKick caters to the unique individual needs and locations of our users, providing a comprehensive suite of safety tools that are specifically designed to address the safety concerns of women, LGBTQ+ and vulnerable persons. 

Other apps are reactive, relying on manual input, requiring users to press buttons or make calls only after an adverse event has occurred or is occurring.

We, on the other hand, are focused on enhancing safety, so that adverse events don’t occur in the first place, and if they do, automatically respond in a proactive manner.

Our benefits include:

• Alerting you to what is going on around you before venturing out
• Directing you home on the safest route (not the shortest!) 
• Knowing what bars and clubs to hit up this weekend, and which to avoid (based on our proprietary safety venue scoring)
• Detecting if you’ve been drugged and alerting your chosen contact
• Identifying locations, venues and routes with elevated danger levels, directing users to safer alternatives
• Providing instant assistance in emergencies – eliminating the need for manual dialling or button pressing
• Enhancing safety during rideshares and taking public transport 
• Making “I made it home” texts a thing of the past. Automatically sending notifications when everyone reaches their destinations, regardless of whether they are using an iPhone or Android
• Automatically recording and securing forensic data in the cloud – your evidence, always protected 

Personal safety requires multiple features that operate in different circumstances and detect different things at different times. One-off solutions don’t work because everyone needs a different solution at different times, whereas everyone needs one of our features some of the time.

As one of our beta users said: “I’m going to pick this over other apps because MySideKick is like eight apps in one.”

How do you ensure data security? 

Our systems adhere to the highest standards of data security, avoiding the collection of unnecessary PII, encrypting sensitive data, and protecting internal systems behind state-of-the-art firewalls and other security measures.

What feedback have you received so far?

Our beta app was tested on hundreds of women on numerous college campuses across the United States 95 per cent of students and 83 per cent of parents said they’d subscribe for all four years of college. 

We have also received unsolicited outreach from student organisations, and we are working with them to roll out MySideKick on their campuses. 

Many of our student users requested that our app be available for them when they graduate college, so we are opening up MySideKick in select cities. 

Where are you with the business now?

Our beta app launch and market testing has been completed and we are gearing up for limited production launch on select campuses and cities, and we are working diligently to close our seed financing round to fund continued operations, growth and expansion.

Where do you see the company in five years?

We expect to be fully deployed on college campuses and major cities in most english speaking markets, as well as have started to make inroads in other dominant languages and international markets.

To find out more, visit mysidekickapp.io.