Builders

Food

Apeel Sciences

Apeel adds a layer of plant-derived protection to the surface of fresh produce to slow water loss and oxidation — the factors that cause spoilage. Giving fresh produce more shelf life in this way lowers one of the barriers to cooking fresh healthy meals — needing to restock fresh produce frequently.

PAIRWISE

Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to make fruits and vegetables more appealing to consumers. Their aim is to create produce that is more enticing, more convenient and more likely to end up in people’s grocery carts. It’s a powerful strategy with a great motto:  “healthy shouldn’t be a choice—it should be a craving.”

June

June offers multi-function, software-controlled ovens that integrate with recipes in order to make the process of cooking easier, more reliable and thus less stressful.

Fresco

Fresco is aiming to make it easier for people to cook their meals through a recipe app that connects with a growing array of smart appliances -- from Bosch, Electrolux, GE, InstantPot and more. 

CKBK

CKBK has been labeled “Spotify for Cookbooks.” It’s a subscription-based recipe search engine that offers access to recipes from hundreds of “the world’s best” cookbooks. There’s even the hint of a smart kitchen play as they’re offering links between selected recipes and certain connected ovens from Bosch.

Plant Jammer

Aiming to bring dinner back, Plant Jammer combines food science, data science and AI to construct vegetarian recipes on the fly, based on what you have available at home.

Bento

Bento lower barriers to getting access to healthy food for people who are food-insecure. It offers a service where people who are eligible for food assistance can use SMS text to request meals that they can pick up at local restaurants.

Good Eggs

Good eggs is an online grocery delivery company, specializing in fresh, organic and sustainable foods. Skipping the physical supermarket or grocery store, Good Eggs goes straight to the consumer, enabling fresh and long-lasting ingredients for home cooking.

Thistle

We’d love to see more actual cooking of meals, but nestled in between takeout/delivery of unhealthy meals and the prepared meal kits, lies Thistle, a subscription-based prepared meal (ready-to-eat) service that delivers exclusive healthy, mostly plant-based meals, mostly sourced locally and sustainably.

Prepared Meal Kits

Prepared meal kits from companies like HelloFresh, Blue Apron and Home Chef fill an important need: making the task of cooking a meal at home less arduous. But they’re relatively expensive, running from $8-$12 per meal per person. Lemontree, a nonprofit, is bringing prepared meal kits to low-income families for $3 a serving.

Smart Indoor Farming Systems

Several companies have sprung up offering appliances to grow your own produce using hydroponic, aeroponic and sometimes soil-based techniques. These range from small, relatively inexpensive countertop models from companies like Hong Kong-based Aspara to bookshelf-style units (Rise Gardens) all the way to high-end cabinet-mounted appliances like those from Farmshelf.

Home

Veev

Veev is developing homes, creating a building system and building a smart home platform. They’re emphasizing healthier construction materials and, through their smart home platform, creating opportunities to control and tailor environmental conditions like lighting and climate to suit well-being.

Darwin

Developed by Delos, an Australian company with a mission “to improve human health and wellbeing by creating buildings that are developed with people’s health and wellness at the centre of design,” Darwin is a building control platform offering home environmental solutions that include air and water filtration; lighting that mimics and supports circadian rhythms; and a sleep solution that creates a transitional ambiance conducive to falling asleep.

Culdesac

There’s a buzz about the 15-minute city idea that Paris and some other cities are pursuing, based on neighborhoods where all needs can be found within 15 minutes of transportation.  Culdesac Tempe is aiming to take that a step further -- creating a car-free neighborhood from scratch. The 600-unit development features apartments, courtyards, retails spaces, tree-lined sidewalks, multiple transportation options (e.g. bikes, scooters, rideshare) and a park.

f.lux

f.lux is software that adjusts the color temperature of your computer screen to adapt to the time of day, with warm color at night and bright light, like sunlight, during the day. It eliminates the blue light, which has been shown to suppress melatonin, a hormone that influences the onset of sleep, from the display at night. It illustrates the approach of influencing a desired health behavior — better sleep — by changing the environment, as opposed to prompting the behavior through information or persuasion. For more on the story of f.lux, check out the profile we published.

Casper Glow Light

Casper sells a Glow Light — a lamp that is designed to help you fall asleep. It gradually dims and gets warmer at night, mimicking the natural experience of sunset. Like f.lux, it seeks to create an environment that is conducive to sleep.

Philips

Philips is focusing on sleep through its SmartSleep line of products: an assessment tool, a bedside light that adjusts its color temperature to match sunset before bed and bright light to wake you up, a headband designed to boost deep sleep brainwaves and sleep apnea devices.

Dyson

Dyson has designed a pair of “Lightcycle” lamps -- a floor lamp and a desk lamp -- that track and mimic the local daylight conditions, adjust to ambient lighting, and adapt to multiple different tasks. 

Somnox sleep robot

Somnox has created a “sleep robot,” essentially a tech-enabled pillow (to be cuddled) that gently expands and contracts in synchrony with your breathing and plays quiet, meditative music and sounds. All designed for you to relax and fall asleep more easily.

Front Porch Forum

Front Porch Forum is designed to bring neighbors and community residents together through online discussions. It’s hyper-local in its structure and it’s still not national in scale, limited to Vermont and parts of New York state.

State of Place

State of Place works with cities to plan for healthy, equitable spaces, using micro-scale urban design data, predictive analytics and simulations.

Building4Health

Building4Health offers an indoor and outdoor air monitoring, data analysis and remediation recommendation platform that is based on human physiology. Their analysis guides a ventilation schedule designed to optimize occupant health. Improving indoor air quality can yield better sleep.

Transportation

Transit 

The Transit app creates a single interface to manage real-time information and trip planning for public transit systems and other services such as ride-hailing and bike shares. By providing a better user experience for public and active modes of transportation, Transit lowers the bar to using them, potentially resulting in healthier modes of transportation. 

Remix

Remix has created a data platform and planning solution that cities can use to navigate the emergence of new modes of mobility (e.g. bike shares, e-bikes, scooters and ride hailing) in order to create healthy, sustainable solutions that integrate these modes with other public and private transportation options. By helping cities better support more active modes of transportation, they’re creating opportunities for people to get more movement into their days. For more on the story of Remix, check out this interview we conducted with their CEO, Tiffany Chu.

Lyft

Lyft has begun integrating public transportation directions into its main app in many locations. Like Transit, anything to improve the ease of use and overall experience of public transportation is a step in the right direction.

Scooters

Scooters, especially dockless, shared scooters from companies like Bird, Lime, and Lyft evoke a variety of strong opinions, but they offer a relatively healthy last mile transportation option. While they don’t require as much physical activity as walking or biking, they certainly require more than driving or being driven. And they get you outdoors.

E-bikes

In general, electric bicycles show a net health benefit by substituting for car trips and by lengthening bicycle trips. In effect, they lower the barrier to people engaging in an active transportation mode, by reducing the exertion needed for hills and extending the range of travel.  

Entertainment & Recreation

Niantic Labs

In addition to the cultural phenomenon Pokémon GO, Niantic offers the augmented reality games Wizards Unite and Ingress. In addition, They've created a Real-World Platform on which developers can build augmented reality games. Pokemon GO, in particular, has been demonstrated to increase physical activity among its players and augmented reality games as a genre offer the potential to get more people to move more, get outdoors and be social.

Meetup

Meetup, the longstanding coordination platform for local communities of interest, offers both social connection and the benefit of getting people out of the house, even, in some cases, getting outdoors.

Marco polo

A social connection app without likes or ads, Marco Polo is designed to help people stay in touch with friends and family. It’s focused on strengthening relationships with video chats, whether live, asynchronous, or in groups.

Soonly

Soonly is trying to “spark authentic connection through action and vulnerability.” They’ve set up a service that nudges you to reach out to the people in your social circle as a way to nurture your relationships.

Seek

iNaturalist has created the Seek app, which draws people outside by tapping people’s curiosity about the natural world. People snap photos of plants and animals around them and the app identifies and provides information about them. It has elements of scavenger hunts and citizen science and is a good example of “pulling” healthy behaviors through motivations other than health.

GirlTrek

Set up as a platform to find fellow walkers, GirlTrek is a health movement for African-American women and girls grounded in civil rights history and principles through walking campaigns, community leadership, and health advocacy. It gets people outdoors, moving around, with friends -- and it builds community ties.

OTR Pass

With the tag line “go play outside with friends,” OTR Pass aims to build community by getting people outside sharing experiences together.It offers a membership for thousands of outdoor adventure activities like surfing, skiing, climbing, foil boarding, along with free gear rentals, activity discounts, meetups and events.

Hipcamp

Hipcamp has been billed as “Airbnb of the Outdoors,” encouraging people to find and rent new campsites, including on hosts’ private lands, and measures itself on nights spent outdoors.

Anyplace America

Anyplace America is a website that helps to get people outdoors by offering topographic maps and photos of all kinds of natural and man-made landmarks across the U.S.