harbor Launches Backed by $5M in Seed Funding

harbor

harbor, a Los Angeles, CA-based emergency readiness company , launched with $5m in seed funding.

harbor provides an app and readiness platform which offers a way to assess and develop preparedness for emergency events such as wildfires, hurricanes, storms and drought by curating expert advice and personalizing, automating, and gamifying key aspects of home safety.

The platform guides and automates the preparedness process, combining planning with information that will users to stay calm and safe before, during, and after any disruption.

harbor has scanned hundreds of millions of data points from federal agencies like NOAA, FEMA, and USGS as well as land maps and building codes to pinpoint individual household risk. It then provides steps people can take on a regular basis to increase their preparedness, and stay informed with real-time updates and advice when disasters hit.

Led by Dan Kessler, CEO, brings over 15 years of experience in consumer internet technologies and subscription businesses to launch and scale harbor. He served as a VP of global business development at Headspace, where he focused on long-term business growth across the brand’s consumer, enterprise and healthcare departments. Before that, he served as SVP of Operations and Strategy at Hallmark, where he drove new strategic initiatives for the company’s digital greetings and SVOD service.

Kessler is joined by Eduardo Fonseca as Chief Technology Officer, an entrepreneur and startup advisor. He was most recently the CTO of GoodRx where he grew the engineering team from eight to close to 100 engineers, led the diligence and integration for three acquisitions, and oversaw complete architectural revamp spanning mobile, backend and frontend. Kessler has 25+ years of experience in software engineering and 15+ years of leadership experience.

The company is also announcing a team of advisors including:

  • Alice Hill, current senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior director for resilience policy on President Obama’s National Security Council
  • Juliette Kayyem, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and CNN national security analyst who served as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security
  • Brock Long, Executive Chairman of Hagerty Consulting and a Former Administrator of FEMA from 2017-2019, where he led the nation through 220 declared disasters and wildfires
  • DeeDee Bennett, assistant professor at SUNY-Albany in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity
  • Linda Mansollilo, a medical officer in the Air Force Reserve, biotech strategist, founder of LadyBugOut, and instructor for the Defense Institute of Medical Operations (DIMO)
  • Chris Harris, expert in disaster and casualty risk management, former CEO of Montpelier Re Holdings, and former Chairman of Blue Capital Reinsurance.

harbor has been incubated by 25madison, a venture studio that has seeded the development of the platform.

FinSMEs

28/08/2020

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