Way back in December, we had the supreme pleasure of becoming acquainted with the founders of RunSafe, the accidental startup. For Violet and Sharif Alexandre, safety is more than just a problem to be solved for the community—it’s personal.

After experiencing a traumatizing event while out running, Violet and Sharif knew it was time to change the face of safety for runners. With RunSafe, the Alexandres offer standard fitness tracking features such as pace, time, calories, etc. but largely emphasize its safety features that revolve around the big three components of prevention, action, and response. See more about that HERE.

For a startup like theirs, 6 months is a long time—and in that time, a lot has changed for the Alexandres. Not only did they just recently graduate from Boomtown and grow RunSafe, they’ve embarked on a new startup journey that builds off of the idea of this safety app. Once they sent us this video that outlines their big new venture FABRIQ, we knew we had to learn more.

FABRIQ is not just a safety app to keep you safe while you exercise—it’s something much bigger. FABRIQ is something that may very well soon keep you and your loved ones protected in all facets of your lives.

We recently sat down with the Alexandres to learn more:

Innovators Peak: It looks like you guys are doing really well based on the video that Violet has shared with us.

Violet: You know, sometimes when you’re in it, you don’t really set back to celebrate your successes—so hearing that is great. *Laughs* Thank you.

IP: Of course. So do you want to tell us a little bit more about what has been happening since the last time that we talked?

V: We finished Boomtown and while we were in there, we always saw that with RunSafe there was a bigger vision on the safety side because we were talking to people that were using RunSafe and these runners were coming up with innovative ways to use RunSafe for other safety purposes. For instance with real estate agents and while online dating. These various things made us realize that there is a bigger play here than fitness and safety in an app. We have a more powerful ability to make an impact as an API platform. We really started to vet that out and basically look at this where we’re basically looking to integrate with any apps and wearables to make intelligent safety available to their users. That’s basically how we ended up as FABRIQ.

IP: So what’s the difference between RunSafe the app and FABRIQ the API platform?

V: We have safety functionality that’s in RunSafe. For instance, alerts, notifications, and all these safety different features aside from the fitness features. Those safety features can be made available in any app or wearable by a simple integration of few lines of code into another app. Are you familiar with Twilio?

IP: I’m not.

V: Ok so Twilio is basically what made text messaging available to any developer. So if I’m a developer and I’m out there building an app, and I want to do text messaging—I could go through a laborious process of building text messaging, but the reality is that I don’t. What I do is I go and I use Twilio’s API in order to have that text messaging seamlessly available. You don’t even realize that, as a developer, I’m using Twilio to offer you that text messaging feature. All we’re doing is the same thing with personal safety. Now any developer out there has the ability to tap into our safety API in order to offer personal safety to their customers.

IP: So this happens in apps that you partner with…

V: That we integrate with. So you could imagine a day where the Uber app, the Lyft app, the Match app—all of these apps are potential integrations that we can do. At that point, whenever a user is using that app, they can opt into FABRIQ’s features.

We’ll also have a FABRIQ dashboard app, which isn’t built yet but will be in the coming month to two months. What that looks like is a dashboard where if you want to watch over your mom using Runkeeper, your daughter using OKCupid, and your father using Strava—you can watching over all of them in your FABRIQ dashbard app.

FABRIQ app home screen.

IP: What was it that inspired you to move more towards something like FABRIQ that is so much bigger? Was that something that happened in Boomtown?

V: It did happen in Boomtown, but it also really came with speaking to customers of RunSafe. Hearing them say that they have other areas of their lives where they were using RunSafe even though it’s not specific to it.  We were able to step back and say, “Wow you know, if we want to have a larger impact on safety—you can grow an app at a fast pace—but how small is just looking at running and safety and how powerful it is when you look at the powerful safety features we have being applicable to so many other areas.”

Sharif: One of the things that we also realized in Boomtown was this idea that people really need a safety profile the way that they have a social profile. Having a single safety identity that can follow you across your apps—that’s something that no one is doing yet has an extreme power.

IP: Let’s talk that timeframe more specifically. What’s that looking like?

S: From a timeframe perspective we have RunSafe already out there in the market now. We have the integration with the Drunk Mode app that should be done in the next four to six weeks. That will probably be the same timeframe for the FABRIQ dashboard app. We’re also in conversations with several high profile partners. Those will take a little bit longer, but we hope to make an announcement relatively soon.

That announcement is something we are anxiously awaiting.  For the sake of yourself, your loved ones, and your communities—you should be too.