Care for all

• Did you know that SMEs, freelancers, gig workers, and the self-employed often struggle to get the same healthcare benefits as those with more traditional work arrangements? 500-backed healthcare platform ALLCARE is on a mission to take care of that.
• The company partnered with Kumu, a community and social networking app, to provide accessible and holistic benefits for Kumu’s community of content creators in the Philippines!
• “Our goal is to provide access to complete and affordable worker benefits to everyone, regardless of the type of work,” said Co-founder & CEO Cindy Burdette. “We recognize the courage and guts it takes for content creators to pursue their passions outside the typical employment set-up. We’re hopeful that this partnership will help them create more and grow their livelihood even more.”
• Through ALLCARE’s MyBenefits Dashboard, users can get access to health insurance plans, 24/7 telehealth service, life and accident insurance, annual physical exams, free mental health assessments and counseling, as well as dental and optical care. Users will also be entitled to fitness and productivity benefits.
• Read the full article here.

Next-gen female tech leaders

• “Data helps keeps us honest,” said Co-founder of 500-backed superapp Grab, Hooi Ling Tan, on ensuring that there are no biases in gender and pay distribution within the company.
• Hooi Ling revealed that she didn’t encounter discrimination normally faced by women in tech, and hopes to cultivate similar environments for others. Recently, Grab announced it will raise the proportion of women in leadership positions to 40% by 2030 — up from 34% now.
• Currently, the company organizes women’s leadership events and runs mentoring schemes to support them in joining the industry.
• Hooi Ling believes that Grab has created opportunities for women who may previously not have been able to join the workforce. “Not everybody in the world can do a nine-to-five job, five days a week. Some of them need flexibility because they are moms, they are parents,” she said, adding that companies need to improve conditions for working mothers to ensure there is no brain drain of female talent.
• Read the full interview here.

Boosting sustainability with analytics

• There’s a more sustainable way to scale rural development, infrastructure, and mining; 500-backed drone startup Aarav Unmanned Systems (AUS) is partnering the Center for Developing Intelligent Systems (CDIS) of IIT Kanpur, a public technical university in Uttar Pradesh, India, to harness advanced drone data analytics to make that happen.
• Both companies believe that this is the first step toward unlocking the latent potential of drone data.
• AUS is the largest drone-solution provider for the CDIS’s SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages & Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas) scheme, under which it has mapped more than 5.5M acres of rural areas across 18,000 villages.
• Read the full article here.