Humaxa

Every year, millions of racially-based workforce issues go unaddressed because employees are reluctant to talk openly about awkward topics like workplace bias. But not knowing about or addressing such issues cost more than $1.6 Trillion - just last year - according to Forbes and Statista. 

Humaxa has developed a digital assistant that uncovers employee issues anonymously and offers immediate solutions - right in the flow of work. It predicts and prevents diversity/equity/inclusion issues for employers while simultaneously empowering employees, creating a win-win scenario.

By demonstrating the financial impact of eradicating bias in the workplace, organziations and workers everywhere - all over the world - would reap the rewards of Humaxa's anonymous digital assistant.

[Source: https://builtin.com/diversity-...]

THE AVERAGE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN THE UNITED STATES IN 2018 WAS 3.8%  

But the unemployment rate varies significantly by race and ethnicity:

Black or African American: 6.5%

Hispanic or Latinx: 4.7%

White: 3.5%

Asian: 3.0%

AS OF 2018, 19.2% OF FAMILIES DON’T HAVE A SINGLE FAMILY MEMBER WHO IS EMPLOYED
If you look at families by race and ethnicity, the statistics are drastically different:

Black or African American families: 20.7%

White families: 19.6% 

Hispanic or Latinx families: 12.5% 

Asian families: 11.7% 

--- BUT ---

RACIALLY & ETHNICALLY DIVERSE COMPANIES ARE 35% MORE LIKELY TO PERFORM BETTER

In 2015, McKinsey & Company conducted a study that found companies with high racial and ethnic diversity among their employees outperformed their counterpart companies by 35%. 

A 10% INCREASE IN RACIAL AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY ON SENIOR EXECUTIVE TEAMS LEADS TO INCREASED EBIT

Teams notice a 0.8% increase in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) when they increased racial and ethnic diversity on senior executive teams by 10%.

SALES REVENUE INCREASES 15 FOLD AMONG COMPANIES WITH HIGH RACIAL DIVERSITY

Companies that report the highest levels of racial diversity saw 15 times the sales revenue compared to companies with the least diversity.

It's not always easy to open up and talk about awkward workplace issues that involve diversity, equity, and inclusion. Workplace bias can be subtle and confusing, but it can also lead to big issues for employers.

Humaxa has developed a digital assistant that uncovers employee issues anonymously and offers immediate solutions - right in the flow of work. It simultaneously work on behalf of both employers and employees. 

For employers, it acts as an "early warning system" to detect potential workplace issues around racial bias - before they become issues in the first place.

For employees, it allows works to anonymously talk to a digital assistant whose only purpose in life is to give people a safe place to talk, without judgement, and offer up immediate solutions - right in the flow of work.

Our digital assistant is available to everyone in a workplace, but was specifically designed to help those who need a safe place to talk about workplace issues - often those at the bottom, those who experience bias, and those who need extra help.

Each individual worker has a different story. Often, as the metrics show, people from ethnic or racial minorities struggle to reach the highest echelons of management and leadership. Our anonymous digital assistant gathers data around WHY this is happening and tries to help in a safe, meaningful way. 

The digital assistant platform tunes itself based on direct feedback from users to customize the experience, getting gradually better and better over time. It also asks for direct feedback about itself that goes to us, the developers of the platform. We use this feedback to bring more and more value to the end users.

"Provide tools and opportunities for equitable access to jobs, credit, and generational wealth creation in communities of color."

For most people, generational wealth and security is developed through meaningful and financially beneficial employment. While there are many factors that go into generational wealth creation, if we can scale Humaxa's solution to provide win-win scenarios for employers all over the world and prove the economic value of an ethnically diverse workforce - especially within leadership - we'll be paving the way for generational wealth creation for communities of color for years to come.

Humaxa has:

4 paid accounts

11k+ users

0 churn

We are taking an existing problem, that many people are attempting to solve, and creating a product category around it. 

What if the concept of a workplace survey was transformed into a smart, predictive, interactive AI Assistant that offered to take immediate action, based on your conversation with it?

There is a future where workplace surveys - about workplace bias and other awkward topics - no longer exist. We are creating that future.

Current users: 10,853

One year out (projected): 50,000

Five years out (projected): 1.65 m

We do not have access to our clients data, but overall anonymized data across all organizations on the Humaxa platform are standardized and measured against benchmark data:

1. "How do you feel about this organization's efforts towards making people with diverse backgrounds feel valued and included?" - [Score from -100 to +100]

2. Celebration of Diverse Ideas and People

3. DEI Goals - Honest Feedback

4. Diverse Candidate Pool

5. Diversity in Leadership

6. Inclusive access to training and leadership programs

7. Inclusive Social and Team Building Events

8. Influencing DEI Vision and Goals

9. Promotions and Evaluations

Full-time staff: 5

Technically, all five of us including the founders and all workers are contractors.

Guillermo Borges and Carolyn Peer: Co-founders

Carolyn Peer (CEO & Cofounder) is an award-winning Human Capital Management industry leader with an MA in Instructional Technology & a BA in Cognitive Neuroscience. Carolyn started her Future-of-Work Technology career as the Lead Instructional Designer at an early stage startup called ProBusiness. ProBusiness was acquired by ADP. Carolyn left ADP to join forces with her colleague Guillermo Borges & to found Humaxa. Guillermo (CTO & Cofounder) received a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, & was admitted under a full scholarship for an advanced degree in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grand. He is fluent in nine different programming languages, six different infrastructures, user experience design, functional programming, meta-programming, design patterns, unit testing, parallel programming, & clusters. Carolyn and Guillermo have known each other for many years & have been working together since 2017.

For a team of five people, it would be tough to find a more diverse team. Leadership responsibilities are spread out between all five teams members who are men, women, neuro-diverse, from Latino, Asian, African, and European backgrounds, and are from Gen-Z, Millennial, Gen-X, and Baby Boomer generations. We speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese, French, and Czech.

Five people, creating a solution as prodigious as Humaxa, need help. We need introductions, funding, product/market feedback, insights, product category design input, and the list goes on.

We are applying to Solve because we need help to grow and scale.

Financial: Many organizations rely on financial backers to "vouch" for the viability of a company before implementing the solution.

Public Relations: We need help in message crafting that appeals not just to early adopters, but the majority of organizations at scale.

Product/Service distribution: Early adopters often rely on "warm intros" to risk betting on a young company. We need help to scale the Humaxa platform and realize exponential growth.

We would like help in connecting to large, enterprise organizations that realize the advantages of working with young startups solving huge problems and who can iterate quickly.

The ties between health and poverty are well-documented. Our solutions aims to boost the economic prospects and status of underestimated workers at the bottom layers of organizations. This, in turn, provides economic stability and access to health resources for all family members. 

If STEM training, group discussions, or mentorship is predicted to help individual employees, our digital assistant facilitates these solutions, right in the flow of work.

Advancing diversity and economic inclusion is EXACTLY what Humaxa does through its anonymous digital assistant. We would use the prize to scale our ability to reach more employers and employees.

The same underlying technology we use to promote RACIAL diversity, equity, and inclusion can also be used to promote GENGER diversity, equity, and inclusion. We'd use the prize to shape and perfect the gender solutions our AI Assistant offers.

AI is a technology we leverage but we chose this technology knowing that ethics are a key component of its use. We took care to ensure the predictive nature of our AI Assistant's recommendations did not cause some sort of harm while intended for good. As it stands today, the data science we use uses basic algorithms and statistics to improve its recommendations. It in no way prevents people from exploring non-recommended solutions. We keep this ethical framework in mind always.

We would love to use this prize to reach and scale Humaxa's solution to a wider and wider audience, around the globe.