STARTUP INTERVIEW SERIES: Shout out to Dani at Hello Lulo
Introducing the inaugural episode of the WIN Startup Interview Series: meet Dani from the Bronx! Our 2024 Demo Day winner, a proud Latina, and first-time cofounder of Lulo Ventures – a social impact venture focused on benefits access in the federal WIC (Women, Infants, Children) program.
We sat down with Dani to have a conversation about her story and experience discovering her path not only as a founder but as a problem solver deeply embedded in her community. In the current landscape where women-owned businesses and founders are starkly underrepresented and inclusion programs are under scrutiny, Dani provides a refreshing and optimistic perspective. As a natural strategist in the face of crisis, she’s learned that, bizarrely, the more constraints present, the more possibility she sees for innovation.
What’s the human story behind Lulo Ventures?
Our team met in the summer of 2023 as part of the Blue Ridge Lab's Fellowship program bringing together engineers, product designers, product managers, and people with expert and lived experience, to build tech solutions around poverty with community members. The whole idea was not to come in with pre-existing solutions in search of a problem, but design with community, not impose on it.
We’re four team members – my co-founder, Sarah Stellwag, who used to be a Product Manager at Propel, which came out of the first Blue Ridge cohort and innovated in the SNAP space. She’s is passionate about food and what it means - even having managed a farmer's market. Next is Rye Welz Geselowitz, with almost 10 years of experience in tech and, more recently, a postpartum doula. They bring this beautiful duality of hyper-modernity but are also grounded in humanity. Unnati Shukla, beautifully rounding out our original co-founders as Lulo’s Head of Design and has a background in big tech and civic tech. She is very much an artist which is why Lulo looks as gorgeous and welcoming to our users as it is.
My short spiel is that I'm Dani Lopez from the Bronx, I'm a recovering former bureaucrat and a WIC baby. Growing up I had a single immigrant mom. We’re survivors of domestic violence, and it was very tricky to navigate and get the material resources we needed to be safe. That’s why I spent over a decade supporting my communities with education and benefits access, before working as a benefits bureaucrat in financial aid. I covered federal and state resources and was also helping students like me navigate and connect to support beyond the silo of the university.
So many lessons came down to understanding information gaps. People don't know what to ask, who to ask, where, when, or even how to ask it. All of these levels are where something can go wrong. Ultimately, any solution in the benefits space has to find ways to be more proactive and make that information actionable for people.
Can you describe the innovation Lulo brings to the world?
Essentially, for families eligible for the federal WIC, or Women Infants Children benefits program, that are struggling to fully redeem their monthly food package, we provide a free app that families can use in-store to quickly and easily identify eligible food.
What we’ve done is take feedback from WIC families and staff that existing tools weren’t meeting needs and nearly 40% of benefits – over $1 billion in food dollars – were being left behind because of the complexity of item identification in a program where each state mandates the brand, flavor, and container size of approved foods. We built – at our user’s request – an app that is super accessible, showing pictures of WIC-eligible items for families and an offline barcode scanner to make it possible to easily verify any item. We’ve also centralized resources that we know WIC families need – such as food pantries, diaper banks, and maternal mental health hotlines — all kinds of programs local to the community and available state-wide, to close access gaps beyond WIC. And that’s just the starting point. The real pain point is the fact that nearly $1B of WIC food is being left behind. Given how expensive groceries are these days this is the real challenge. You can have the benefit but if you can’t use it, it might as well not be there.
How has the WIN ecosystem impacted Lulo Ventures and you personally?
Community was really what brought me to WIN in the first place. It is lonely as an entrepreneur, and especially as a first-time founder. Most days I don't even know how this is happening, especially coming from government and nonprofits. Things might change tomorrow, so I think to myself, let's do as much as we can today and see how far we go!
Regarding capital, it's amazing to have won a pitch competition that at first seemed so scary. To have people resonate with what we're doing and my community's stories it is really, really amazing. We're a small team of four amazing people, all women and trans so money always helps, but having met people in the ecosystem who are championing our work who have been making introductions, connecting us to resources has been incredible. We don't have all the resources in the world to do everything we want to do, so being able to have people say, “hey, here's something that I want to give and contribute to this mission” is really, really powerful. WIN has been phenomenal in making that happen.
This process of getting that affirmation and recognition within each other, within our community, to lean into the fact that we are amazing, badass people in the world. That is when things really start to move. I'm very much a work in progress, but leaning into that more intentionally rather than looking at my story – growing up in poverty – not as a deficit, but as an asset. Especially because there are so many people where I'm from who don't make it here so I owe it to my communities to do the best I can in whatever place I’m in.
If you could go back to the beginning and change something, what would it be?
I feel so often, especially as women and women of color, we fall into this trap of being unfamiliar with the space within which we work and feel we must justify our existence. This led to fear, and there have been points where I wish I had been less scared. The whole asset here in entrepreneurship, and especially social entrepreneurship, is that you can take risks. You can do things that might not actually work or scale. Regardless, there's going to be something there that you can take away – seeds that you can keep planting so that fear isn’t taking the lead.
What is your perspective regarding the changes in the current landscape?
Growing up, I learned that I'm really good at navigating crises – the more constraints I have, bizarrely, the more possibilities I see.
We're having one of those moments where all the rules are getting thrown out the window, and those constraints are also getting thrown out the window. We’re being more tactical thinking on What can we do? How can we collaborate and be more innovative as organizations? As people in the community, how do we support each other? How do we share resources? How do we vet our partnerships? And what do we have to lose? Let's truly re-imagine what this world could be. I think that these questions are what I’m asking and look forward to asking more. This is worth talking about, the rest is noise.