It all started at a community outreach event. Langston Whitlock was a tech-obsessed teen who coded his first app in JavaScript at age 12, and Ja’Nese Jean was an opera singer. While talking to homeless veterans at the event, Jean began to piece together a pervasive problem around the Atlanta community: people across the city had no transportation to get to their medical appointments. Jean asked Whitlock if he could make an app to fix that, and the longtime coder found himself up to the challenge.

SafeTrip is a ride-sharing app geared to the homeless and elderly that accepts various forms of insurance or credit cards, allowing users to book NEMT (non-emergency medical transport) or EMT (emergency medical transport) to or from wherever they need to go. The company has raised $2 million, with $3.4 million in revenue last year, but perhaps the best part of the company is its redemptive work resulting from its founder’s desire to do good in the community. Whitlock instituted a feeder program at high schools that allows them to become CPR-certified, devensive-driving-trained SafeTrip drivers straight after graduation.

Whitlock finished high school in 2020 and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. Though he had ambitions to attend college even after he started the SafeTrip app, in recent years he has flown mostly under the radar and may or may not have made good on that particular dream. Today he works as the company’s CIO instead of the executive. Whitlock’s story is a great example of what happens when pain points and ideas are allowed to collide with one another in networks and can be manipulated into actionable solutions by unlikely teams of people.