“I had the idea for Epowar in April 2020...

...when I was a second-year uni student. I was walking everywhere, usually in the dark, which made me feel super vulnerable and unsafe. I can’t tell you how many times I would walk with my keys between my fingers, looking anxiously over my shoulder and jumping if I heard a noise! I was especially nervous at the time because there were reports of a man chasing girls and flashing / touching himself literally on my street." I tried a few safety products (e.g. a rape alarm), but they all had the same issue: they needed to be manually activated, which is almost impossible if you’re actually being attacked! (what if you drop your rape alarm, or you don’t have enough time to unlock your phone and press a panic button?!). They didn’t make me feel safe or empowered at all".

"When I learned about Apple Watches being able to detect heart attacks, I had the ‘light bulb’ moment that these devices could be used to detect a physical attack. Maks and I have been working on it since. The brief was simple, it had to be entirely automated. This meant it needed to be both incredibly accurate (no false alarms), while never missing an actual attack. Easy, right? When you’re trying to build something innovative, it’s like being in a maze, you constantly come up against dead ends. There were so many times when doubt would set in and we’d question whether it was actually possible, wondering why the hell we’re trying to do this. Those times are the scariest... when you’ve sacrificed so much and it could still end up being for nothing. It was our passion for the cause that kept us going every single time. Epowar was built to empower women to be safe on their Journeys, and we have poured a ton of love into building a tool that we truly believe will revolutionise women’s safety”.