 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Yasmin Mustafa. She is the founder of Roar. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So Roar is a self-defense wearable technology for women. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the technology and also really where you got the idea. Sure. I got the idea that four years ago, I decided to do something a little bit crazy. I got rid of all my possessions. I got rid of my apartment. I put a backpack on and I booked a solo trip to South America for six months. And I did it for two reasons. The first reason is refugee. And when I came here, even though I was brought here, when I was 15 applying for colleges, I actually found out I was undocumented. So I spent about 10 years working on the table trying to become legalized. And it was a very long, hard battle. It was very difficult to go to school and get a real job. And once I became a US citizen, which happened five years ago, I was also able to sell my first company. I had a software company before Roar. And after those two events, I said, you know what, I'm 30 years old. I deserve a break. I've had a long journey. I'm going to go celebrate. I'm going to start another long journey. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to travel for so long and I couldn't, because when you're undocumented, it's really hard to get back into the country. And you don't have the right credentials. And even after I got my green card, I could, you can't travel after getting your green card, but I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to come back because I've heard stories that I intentionally didn't. And so I booked this six month trip as a way to reward myself and as a way to kind of make up for everything that had happened beforehand. And it was an amazing trip. It was really life-changing. I, when I, when I talk about it, I talk about my life in relation to before the trip and after the trip because it was so transformational. And I went to Spanish school for three weeks, did full Spanish immersion, stayed with the Spanish family in Ecuador. And then I went to Columbia and Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, spent a month in each country. But as incredible as it was, it was also incredibly eye-opening because everywhere that I went and visited, I just kept hearing story after story of a time a woman had been attacked, they were abused or harassed. And it really opened my eyes to the violence women face every day. And a week after I came back to Philadelphia, I was living downtown when my neighbor went out to her car and it's a horrible story. She was grabbed from behind, she was dragged into an alley, she was severely assaulted and brutally assaulted and when I saw the news story the next day, that was when the light bulb moment hit and I called up my co-founder, my formal advisor of my last company and told them about it, Anthony Gold, and we banded together to start War for Good. And the concept initially was completely different. The concept initially, what we thought the problem was of existing self-defense tools, pepper spray tasers, is that you have to pull them out of your pocket or your purse for them to be useful. And it's not like you could just be like, excuse me, one second. I'm like, dig it out. So we thought let's make it wearable so that it's readily accessible. This is one Fitbit was huge. And the initial idea was actually called the Mace Lit, Mace in a Bracelet. And exactly. And as clever as that name was, it was, we found out through market research that it was actually a terrible idea that the number one fear that women had of self-defense tools is I'm afraid I'm gonna be overpowered and my own self-defense device used as a weapon against me. And another one, what if I use it against myself accidentally? And when we did more research, we found that existing self-defense tools are actually made by men for other men. And when the market opportunity for women came about, they shrunk it and they shrinked it and pinked it. And they didn't really account for women's needs. So we went back to the drawing board and we said, all right, we need to make something that's stylish, but discreet, something that can call for help, something that can ward off an attack and something that cannot be used against the person wearing it. And that's how we came up with Athena. So do you have one that you can show our viewers what it looks like? I do, yes. This is what it looks like. How it works, okay. So it has a magnetic band. Initially it was actually a bracelet. And when we were doing self-defense classes, we're prototypes. We actually found that the worst place to wear a safety device is on your wrist. And can you guess why? Somebody grabbed your wrist, grabbed your arm. Exactly. Or now you only have the opposite hand to activate it. So we said, no, we need to make something that's more readily accessible where both hands can be free. So we designed it with this magnetic strip so that you can clip it on any which way you want. Want the most popular options. We've seen our purse pocket bra strap or lapel. And the way it works is if you feel nervous, if you want someone to watch over you, triple press the button and it sends your coordinates to your family and friends, showing exactly where you are. And if there is danger, if you really need help right away, you press and hold it for three seconds and it will also sound an alarm. And in about seven weeks, it'll also be able to call emergency number. The local PSAP 911 center in your new pen. Wow. It's such a great concept. As so many great inventions are, it's really assembling a bunch of components that already exist, right? Your cell phone, an app on your phone, your network of your contacts, a GPS on your phone, and assembling it in a slightly different way for a very specific application. Everything is commonplace that's in the device. There's nothing proprietary about it. It's just a way that we put it together. Again, we took existing technology and put it together in a way and tested it to make sure that it's something that can work. And we worked with police officers as self-defense instructors to put it together which is really eye-opening as well. And the other part, if you can explore, kind of it's a different way to interact with 911. So if it is an emergency, right? You're not picking up the phone. You're not talking. But according to your website, it's faster. There's a lot of ways it's more efficient. You know, there's a lot of benefits to kind of a not phone call connection with what traditionally has been the way you ask for help. And how did getting that through? Is it a regulatory thing? How did that whole process work? It's a great question. It's something that we probably spent about a year working on and we actually have a partner that does it for us. So this partner, what's really cool about them is that they have a relationship with all 500 PSAPs. So a PSAP is just your local 911 center in your area and our service is going to be able to leverage their partnership to be able to connect to all of them. They, the way their system works is they can actually better track you through their service than your normal cell phone can, which is also really cool. And if you're in my emergency contacts and I press this button because I can't call 911 and you're in Orlando, I'm in Philadelphia, it will actually write you to the PSAP in my neighborhood versus your local PSAP. So then it saves the time in terms of calling the Orlando PSAP and then having them call the Philadelphia PSAP and then finding me. So we're really, really excited about this opportunity. So apart from the technology, I want to talk to you a little bit about funding. Funding is one of the greatest barriers that really all technologists, but in particular women founders face, can you describe a little bit about how you went about finding sources of money? You'd already sold a company by then, so you'd already been successful. But what about people without the track record? What would you say? Sure, I'd love to touch on the social mission aspect at some point too, don't mind. For funding, I'm very lucky in the sense that my co-founder, he's also founded several companies in the past and fundraising is his thing. So he's been the one to lead it, but what we did initially, so we spent about 18 months in product development and we did a lot of testing. I mean, really awkward, we put ourselves in really awkward situations where we went to parks and coffee shops and showed people this and said, why would you not use this? Tell me why you don't like this. And then we went back to the drawing board and did it again and again. And then we got to the point where people said, yeah, I want this, I want this for my mom, I want this for my child, I want this for my college student. But there's a world, the difference between saying, yeah, I want it versus buying it. So what we did initially is we actually launched a crowdfunding campaign, we launched an Indiegogo campaign and for us it was really a way to test if we really had, we were onto something. We initially had the goal of $40,000. We, the results really blew us away. We hit the $40,000 goal within the second day, got to 100 by the 10th day, 100,000, and then we ended the campaign with a little bit over 300,000 funding. And that really allowed us to do our seed stage round. And we were lucky from the sense we have a really interesting story. There's a billionaire couple in the UK that found out about us through the campaign after it took off. We had sales in every state in the country, 50 countries worldwide. Ashton Kutcher tweeted about it. It was amazing. It went viral for a little bit, which was incredible. But they learned about it and then reached out to Indiegogo and said, we want to meet this team, the company behind this team. And we connected with them and they immediately put $2 million into the company. We went and met with them in Chicago after they came over and within three days we had the money in our bank account. So we got a little bit lucky but having that crowdfunding campaign and success of it as validation really helped us to be able to raise that additional funding. And then we went to Ben Franklin Technology Partners and they put in $250,000, our local economic resource center that does matching. And that's how we raised our initial seed round. And you mentioned the social mission piece. So I want you to tell everyone a little bit more. Yeah, so I, for a long time, lived in fear. So being undocumented, not really knowing what could happen. And I'm actually giving a talk tomorrow about kind of my whole journey and learning about women living in fear in another different way while traveling throughout South America. I didn't want to build a company that just built products and sold them to women that just put the onus on women. Because it's too common for us to say, you know, you're drinking when something happens or don't wear this, don't go here. And we wanted to change that narrative hence the roar for good aspect. And what we found after talking with psychologists and researchers is that violence against women stems from gender discrimination and inequality. And that there's one trait if taught to young kids when they're most impressionable can actually reduce violence against women. And that's empathy. And the empathy's actually decreased 40% over the last 20 years. And there's a controversy on whether or not it's something that's learned or innate but wherever you fall in that category there's no denying that it is falling regardless. So we invest, we have what we call a roadmap program which is we invest a portion of proceeds of every sale to nonprofits that specifically focus on teaching respect and healthy relationships to young kids when it matters most. Yes, I mean, thank you so much for joining us. This is a really exciting technology. Thank you. We've got to have a Philly show. Come to Philly, please. So you've got Josh Poppelman as a buddy. So come on, Josh, we've got to have us to Philly. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this.