Safely, The App That’s Innovating Sexual Health Care
Courtesy of Safely
Safely, a Los Angeles-based telemedicine company, is trying to take the awkwardness out of STD testing. The app lets users upload medical records, schedule testing with a provider, and share results with potential partners using a private and secure platform. With 90,000 current users based in the United States, Safely’s goal is to become the one trusted platform where users can have secure and private conversations about their STD status. Initially started in 2016, Safely spun out years later after a restructuring, now with 13 full time employees and 43 contract-licensed doctors across the country. Safely has raised $5 million to date.
We sat down with their CEO and founder Lauren Weiniger to chat about how Safely is innovating the sexual health space, its upcoming addition of COVID-19 testing, and how it’s all just the first step to making simple diagnostics more accessible to consumers than ever before.
Hi Gray: We’re really excited about this one because, personally, I have not heard of a platform that does something similar like Safely before. It’s ingenious and really important work what you are doing. How did the idea come about?
Lauren Weiniger: I have always wanted a way to easily ask somebody, "Have you been tested and know what your results were?" I also didn’t understand why that was so awkward or inconvenient, and oftentimes, really expensive to get tested.
The most common thing that people say [is], “omigod why hadn’t that existed yet.” The reason is it was really hard to build. The way it works is you can import results or you can get tested. That ‘imported’ part was really the key piece.
HG: So how does it work?
LW: From the consumer perspective, it’s a super simple app. From the platform perspective, it’s an incredibly complex, vertically integrated telemedicine platform. A big piece is you can import medical records from almost anywhere, and that was definitely the hardest part because we had to partner up with the biggest behemoth players in health care, and as you know, health care is not the easiest, most quick-moving bunch. So we partnered with Quest [Diagnostics] and LabCorp …