ORIGIN STORY

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most acute global health crises our generation has ever faced, we were shocked to realize how few tools existed in our physical environments to combat dangerous pathogens and effectively manage risk.

This seemed to be an especially tough problem for businesses that had to operate at scale. Essential businesses housed in shared commercial buildings carried the greatest burden, and in many cases were forced to shut down altogether. High-risk, high-accountability environments like kitchens and medical facilities were especially important in creating long-term impact on human health.

And yet this problem was very personal. Our CEO spent 7 years of her life acutely sick with undiagnosed Celiac disease, which meant not only was she intimately familiar with pain and suffering from health complications, but that she understood firsthand how critical access to safe food and environments is to individual health.

And while healthy now, her experience being sick forever altered the course of her life. Having worked on incredible technology throughout our careers, we knew we could absolutely do better as a society at keeping people and our environments much safer. In fact, technology wasn't the barrier, commercialization was. Killing viruses and bacteria wasn't the problem, it was doing it in a human-safe and eco-friendly way — without requiring error-prone human intervention — and providing data alongside to help businesses prepare & manage risk.

So we set out to create Population as a health & safety operating system that would help businesses proactively manage dangerous pathogens and get ahead of the next outbreak.