Las Vegas based Pigeonly is solving a problem no one else has tackled before, in a market that no one generally wants to touch.
“We identify and index information on the nation’s incarcerated then transform it into useful and valuable information that connect inmates and society, benefiting both,” the team writes on their website.
“Not far from the slot machines and neon lights of the Strip, a few dozen tech companies hammer away at the future in a downtown area revitalized by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh,” wrote Marco della Cava in USA TODAY. “But you can bet that no founder here has a stranger story than Pigeonly CEO Frederick Hutson.
“You could hang out at Stanford University until the end of time and not find someone like Frederick (Hutson) which is why it is so important to cast a wide net when it comes to funding,” said Mitch Kapor, Kapor Capital and Pigeonly investor. “But simply put, his was one of the best founder presentations I’d seen in a long time.”
Read about Frederick Hutson’s story and learn more about Pigeonly.
About Pigeonly: Pigeonly aggregates information on the nation’s incarcerated, transforming it into organized and usable data that benefits both inmates and society. There are over 3000 prison institutions (County, State and Federal) spread across the US that are home to about 2.3 million inmates. Although information about these inmates are public record it’s not easily accessible to most people. Pigeonly indexes all the prison and inmate related information we can find, then algorithmically find connections between various public records to create a knowledge graph of the prison population. This provides us with the only direct access point into this market, giving us the ability to directly tap into the $2 billion spent on inmate related services each year. Fotopigeon is the first product to launch on the Pigeon.ly platform, It allows users to send printed photos to their incarcerated loved one directly from their cell phone, tablet or computer.
