How A Small Startup Worked To Protect 5.5 Million People From COVID-19
I was half asleep in a Lyft as we pulled in front of Texas Medical Center (TMC), the world’s largest medical village, when I heard the loud bang of metal crashing into metal. Startled, I slowly started opening my eyes as the driver pulled off to a side street. As I got out I saw an older black woman on the ground sitting next to a car that had crashed into another young black woman’s car. Everyone was crying. I called 911 and cradled the older woman, telling her we will be fine.
This was the start of my entanglement with Luminare, the startup that would work to protect these two Houston residents, and the rest of the city’s 5.5 million residents as well.
My route to Luminare starts with my colleague Midori, who taught me about sepsis, one of the leading causes of death in hospitals, and how it affected her friend. I spoke to my top advisor Devin Baptiste of Groupraise about it and he said “you have to check out Luminare, they have solved sepsis”. So while on my way to California for SaaStr Annual, I figured I would take a pit stop in Houston and learn more about Luminare along the way. Little did I know how impactful that trip would be.
I met the Luminare founder Sarma Velamuri at TMC on a Thursday and he gave me the tour of the massive TMC facility. We sat down and he cried as he told me the story of his friend’s daughter passing away from sepsis on his watch. He committed that day to ensuring nobody in the future would die from sepsis.
I was moved.
This is a startup that deserves all the support I can give.
This is what startups are supposed to do.
This is what we as a startup community are supposed to support.
Sarma was pivoting the company from sepsis to using the software for COVID-19 prescreening. They were scheduled to present at HIMSS (the medical conference) at the request of the CDC, right before it was canceled. He was also in search of help from Microsoft on infrastructure and generally on running the startup, as a company with few financial resources. I told him to consider me part of the team, and I came back the next day to get started. As I arrived, the car accident I mentioned earlier happened. Thankfully nobody was hurt and the police came to take care of the riders but that message from above told me that I was in the right place and our joint purpose was to protect those who can’t protect themselves.
Sarma walked out to greet me and we went inside to prepare for a call with the city of Houston. I used my colleague Lauren Perkins’ messaging structure to ensure that we hit on the main points that the city was concerned with, in order to deploy Luminare’s system countywide. The call went well and the team there asked “when can you deploy”, to which Sarma said “Monday”. No pressure.
You never truly know the strength of your connections until they are tested, and this would be the biggest test of them for me. I called on everyone I knew to engage with Luminare to support their growth. We onboarded Luminare to Microsoft for Startups, which gave them $120K in Azure credits along with technical resources for scaling. The Microsoft FastTrack team, via Kristina Williams, jumped in to do technical deep dives with Luminare’s engineering team and Ercenk Keresteci from the Microsoft Industries team sprang to action and within 30 minutes got on a Teams call for 2 hours to give scaling advice to the team. We got support from the COVID-19 task force at Microsoft led by Adam Rogge as well as David Rhew the chief medical officer of Microsoft and Kurt Delbene, a member of the leadership team of Microsoft who leads up COVID-19 communications, who took time out of his busy day to personally engage to support Luminare. These were all folks who I barely had interaction with, but I was proud to see them all step up to the task in a time of need.
The biggest boost of all came from an unlikely source. Our former GM of Microsoft for Startups Chad Fowler (all around great human and jazz musician) helped amplify my request for clojurescript developers to help Luminare to scale. Sadly, the developers we first met were more concerned about what recognition they would gain than doing the work to save lives. Through Chad I met Cognitect founder Justin Ghetland. I asked him “what’s your area of expertise, clojurescript or load testing”, to which he replied “Clojurescript. We wrote it :)”. Whoops :)
With this crack team, we were able to help Luminare develop a solid platform that was adopted by the city of Houston (and Harris County at large) to help curb the spread of COVID-19 in March, when COVID-19 cases were on the way down. It is now also being used by 2 USDA meat processing plants, several churches, professional employer organization (PEO) companies, accounting firms to ensure US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) compliant employee self certification to ensure workplace safety. Luminare has a signed MOU from a branch of our armed forces to modify the platform to ensure key worker safety and thousands of people perform a daily self-assesement via their software.
COVID-19 is not going away, and with cases still spiking, more organizations than ever need Luminare’s solution.
I encourage you to share this story of Luminare with others. Our lives depend on it.
The work continues as they are now hiring people to help them get their software into every medical system and business that needs to control the flow of employees, based on sound epidemiological standards. As the CDC rolls out return to work guidelines, self-certification as enabled by products like Quickscreen are now recommended for all employers.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/guidance-business-response.html
Reach out to info@luminaremed.com for any inquiries into the Luminare software.
TMC Description:
Texas Medical Center (TMC) — the largest medical city in the world—is at the forefront of advancing life sciences. Home to the brightest minds in medicine, TMC nurtures cross-institutional collaboration, creativity and innovation because together, we can push the limits of what’s possible. They see 10MM patient encounters per year, 180,000 surgeries, 750,000 ER visits and 9.200 total patient beds with 106,000 employees.
Luminare:
Luminare is based in Houston, TX and started by Sarma Velamuri and Marcus Rydberg. Sarma is a internal-medicine / hospitalist and Marcus is a tech genius from Stockholm.
The company’s mission is to stop 250,000 people a year from dying of sepsis and prevent millions of people from getting sepsis.
They were awarded “Most-Promising Web & IT Company” in the US in 2017 by the Rice University, and were selected to be part of the Texas Medical Center’s innovation institute. In 2020 prior to COVID Luminare was partnering with the CDC to showcase their patented sepsis detection platform Sagitta.