To date, we have received $125,000 from TEDCO (a Maryland state funded venture capital firm). With that, we have completed the National Science Foundation's I-CORPS and I-CORPS NEXT programs that helped us to complete a customer discovery engagement to identify if there is a need to solve the problem that we are pursuing and also to validate the need for our solution / product and help us build a strong business model that we can test to find market-fit. We have subsequently built a working prototype (minimalist product) that is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store for our early adopters to try and provide us with feedback (note that our product used to be called Shelly News and may show as such in the app store). We have an ongoing partnership with the University of Maryland's School of Information Studies and are working on a year-long capstone project with final year masters / graduate students in its Human-Computer Interaction Masters program to further refine or validate our fully designed product to help prioritize our feature roll-outs for the future.

In a society where the most popular voices are the ones that are likely to be heard and paid attention to, local news can get lost. Alirtify provides society with a unique opportunity to push local news to the forefront and change the narrative on what truly matters to our local communities.