Veoci CEO Sukh Grewal on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
From an office on Church Street, one of New Haven’s tech success stories is helping first responders save lives amid the spread of Covid-19.
The success story is Veoci, a platform created by a company founded here in 2011 to provide closed online communication systems for governments and businesses to collect data and respond in real time during crises.
Veoci has grown to 65 employees and amassed a client list from around the world since it came to local prominence by helping New Haven’s government respond to Hurricane Sandy.
And now it has the mother of all crises to help people navigate: the Covid-19 pandemic. Some 30,000 people are logging in to Veoci’s dashboards to harvest information, track responses, and make decisions, from New Haven to Alameda County in the Bay Area, to Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Tanzania.
Veoci was already up and running in those later nations as they confronted previous public health crises.
“This pandemics know no boundaries,” Veoci CEO and co-founder Sukh Grewal said during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“The key to all these matters is figuring out” where problem spots are, collecting good information (including mapping and avoiding duplicating call “tickets” about problems in the field), prioritizing responses, and assigning resources well, he said. Officials use Veoci’s communications system and dashboards to do that.
In this crisis, Veoci has also set up webinars to help responders understand Covid-19. The director of Yale’s clinical virology laboratory, Marie Louis Landry, who has contact and past experience in Wuhan and is overseeing tests here in New Haven, conducted one webinar on virology and the history of the coronavirus. School of Medicine Professor Paula Kavathas did another on how the immune system responds to Covid-19.
Click on the video below to watch the full episode of “Dateline New Haven” with Veoci’s Sukh Grewal, in which he describes the company’s growth, its work during the Covid-19 crisis, and the need for increased investment in pubic health research.