This month we interviewed Dr. Nir Tenenbaum, a 2019 Pears Challenge alum and Truvi's Co-Founder and CEO. Truvi is building an AI platform to optimize decision making during emergency response. Recently, Truvi was admitted to Google for Startups SDG Advisor Program!
Tell us about Truvi "The frequency and intensity of emergency events are growing, while the capacity to respond remains stagnant. Paradoxically, there are more solutions and technologies than ever before, yet they cannot be found quickly, reliably and efficiently. Truvi is a smart online platform that can quickly find and reliably produce relevant and verified solutions and bridge cross-sector partnerships to help create a world where knowledge and resources to mitigate risk, optimize impact, prepare for future events, and strengthen resilience and response capacity, is sustainable and available to all.
Truvi offers a systemic change by replacing intensive processes, stagnant excels and limited libraries with a smart, resource-efficient and collaborative platform that harnesses objective and past experience data into a simplified online process.
Truvi’s algorithms filter out misinformation and consider data from current events, contextualized variables and specific properties for each need and solution, to provide an intuitive and guided data-based path from vital need to a calculated, relevant and precise match for each clarified circumstance. The user-friendly interface and AI extends community reach by connecting and engaging the private and public sectors. It enables local responders, governments, communities and organizations to efficiently discover and share tailor-made solutions to specific needs based on comprehensive access to best practices, reviews, expert knowledge, research, innovation and past experiences. TRUVI aims to promote faster response, empower effective management and coordination, in order to efficiently allocate time and resources on implementation rather than research and consultation.
Truvi's allows all stakeholders to save more lives by helping to optimize and expedite an emergency response, enhance adaptive recovery, and build resiliency for future crises."
What is special about Truvi’s approach?
"Truvi is the first crisis response and preparedness platform that replaces intensive processes with a matching algorithm that bridges cross-sectors and allows them to find tailor-made solutions to their vital needs. Truvi places equitable and holistic emergency response and preparedness front and center by integrating demographic, cultural, financial, religious, and gender-based features, giving it the leverage of exceedingly precise matching. Throughout the research stage, Truvi’s data analysts kept encountering the same dead-ends due to the exhausting and tenuous process of current mainstream approaches. Currently, they depend on people’s existing precarious and diverse work habits, organizations’ internal knowledge based on its specific services, limited online libraries that provide a narrow scope of solutions, online marketplaces aimed at selling solutions, or peer exchange. In all current approaches, there is not a single direct guiding path between vital needs and best-fit solutions that considers the context in real-time or provides the ability to access and share knowledge, a major limiting factor for effective aid, preparedness, and recovery. The Truvi solution is unique as it provides proactive data-based insights that guide critical decisions in a concrete, timely and resource-effective way pertaining to crisis-affected areas, building resilience among vulnerable communities, improving partnerships, anticipating and preparing for future events, and educating cross-sectors, to ultimately save more lives."
What was your personal motivation to engage in this field?
"My journey in this field began in 2012 when I began helping conservation organizations in their quest to stop deforestation and illegal poaching. Through my fieldwork, I realized how even very powerful international NGOs and governmental agencies are lost in the sea of information, especially when they are in critical need of solutions. In 2017 I co-founded an NGO called SmartAid that provided technical support to the Yazidi in Iraq, to Mexico after the earthquake, and many more. The same problem that I saw in conservation came up again and again in our humanitarian work with communities and NGOs. When communities and NGOs wanted to learn what solutions exist to their specific critical problems, or what was already done before to build resilience, the process was excruciating, taking weeks at a time, with no clear answer what was the best-fitting, optimal solution. I decided it is time to harness technology and build a smart fishing-rod for the humanitarian sector. A trusted platform that will allow every community and NGO to filter through the sea of information and misinformation to find the more relevant solutions for them while improving harnessing of lessons learned and enabling all stakeholders to save more lives."
What is your advice for Israeli entrepreneurs that want to build companies that address development challenges?
"From my experience, a few main points to consider:
1. Research, research, research – before making a move and relocating your life, make sure you learn thoroughly about the sector you wish to serve. Learn well who are the players, what is the need, and establish a real pain point with a clear market and willingness to pay. Make sure you speak and interview as many people as possible without letting them know your solution, and learn if it is really a need they perceive to be true and if anyone will be interested to pay.
2. Find good people – Find people who are experts and leaders in the field you wish to work in, and make sure they provide you with a realistic, truthful mirroring that will make you build a more clear and need-based solution.
3. MVP: Make sure you quickly create an MVP, and that it is just an MVP. It is easy to get distracted but it is best to try and fail fast, or learn fast rather than plan for 2 years and then fail at your first try."
