Q&A With Ian sanders, Blue Cape Founder and CEO
Ian sanders, Blue Cape Founder and CEO
What does Blue Cape do?
Sanders: Blue Cape is a first of it’s kind platform that allows it’s end-users to easily understand the risk an area poses from an epidemiological perspective at high levels of granularity to given viral respiratory disease such as Influenza , Covid-19 , etc. and at the same time provide useful insights to different organizations at large when it comes to these types of problems
How can it help users avoid infection risks?
Sanders: By allowing people to easily understand where there exists risk to them from these types of problems we can help them in making better decisions on how best to protect themselves and act in the given area. By doing so we can properly incentivize and encourage social distancing among our users and reduce the rate of transmission among them.
What is the business model?
Sanders: When you look at the distribution of people getting hospitalized in the US on an average year from Influenza it becomes very clear who they are. over 70% of them belong in the 50+ age bracket, people with diabetes, heart condition: these people from time immemorial have been disproportionately effected from these types of problems. We are unfortunately now seeing the same from Covid-19. The business model is together with entities we work with to give our platform to their most at risk groups that they service through an Application Licensing Agreement per a user. By doing so we can allow the given entity to pick and choose who they want to give it to and of course if they want we can be a part of that process.
What is the value for insurance companies?
Sanders: If a person is covered by a given health policy and is hospitalized even after deductibles, coinsurance most of that cost will be borne by the health provider.
68% of Americans are covered by a private health Insurer. In the US alone on avg 442,000 people are hospitalized every year from Influenza , and just in 2020 around 1 Million people were hospitalized in the US for Covid-19. So when we take these costs and we multiply them over a macro-scale the cost becomes quite large. And with Covid set to become endemic these costs will become on a yearly basis significantly higher. By helping at risk policy holders make better decisions during Flu/Covid Season we can significantly reduce the rate of transmission among them which will reduce the rate of hospitalizations among them.
Can you give some numbers?
Sanders: Just for the Top 5 Health Insurance companies if our platform is properly implemented we could see cost reductions in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
What other kinds of customers are you approaching?
Sanders: At this time we are primarily focused on the health insurance industry but we have plans at a later stage to focus on our other verticals.
Will you try working with government organizations or municipalities?
Sanders: We are primarily focused on the health insurance industry, but we are open to talking to any government body municipality who reaches out to us.
What investments were made in the company so far?
Sanders: As of now we have been boot-strapped as things are now progressing rapidly for us on a number of fronts we now are in the midst of raising our seed round.
Tell me about your professional background and about other key figures in the company.
Sanders: I actually come originally from a security background having served as a special forces operator in Unit 217 one of Israels elite Counter Terror Units. After my service I went into the security consulting business for the mining industry in Western Africa, there I started to get really interested in the world of bits and bytes and just got hooked. I decided to do a 180 degree career change and dove into the world of computer science. The product itself actually came from me working on a completely different application for weather modelling over small geographic areas. Our Senior Medical Advisor Dr Eran Kopel has been a practicing epidemiologist since 2008 and is a senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv University for public health he has really been of great help when consulting and validating our end results. Our CTO Ami Goren has been in the AI world for quite a while having built and run R&D teams from the US and Israel for many years.
what’s Blue Capes Vision?
Sanders: Blue Cape see the health risks in our every-day environment only increasing, we need to allow people to perceive and understand these risks so they can make better decisions.
