Vianca Martinez

I'm a software engineer with about 5 years of experience, and I founded a tech startup back in February that's focused on helping incarcerated people and their families. What I'm building is a product that makes communication more affordable because right now, the cost of current services to talk to inmates from the outside is very high. I'm trying to build something that's smarter and more cost-effective to lower those costs for the families, so that the incarcerated individuals don't feel like they're alone and aren't burdened by the cost just to communicate. Throughout my career, I've worked in fintech, edtech, and even marketing as a software engineer. Right now, I still work full-time in corporate, but I'm trying to get out of corporate and do my company full-time. As a solopreneur, my day-to-day involves doing research, reaching out to people who could get me in the market or people involved in the prison industry or Department of Corrections, and just keep building the product. I have an AI research lab that helps simulate the conversations going on in prison, and we're using those to build artifacts for our behavioral analysis component. It's a very entrenched market, and it's quite challenging to convince the decision makers to switch to something that's more fair, especially for that group of incarcerated people.