With lives hanging in the balance, Jesse Berns wondered why she was still using paper forms and Excel spreadsheets during the Ebola crisis.

Working in Liberia in 2015, the epidemiologist grew frustrated that there was no quick way to catalog and send patient details. It's a problem in crisis zones around the world, where the needs are urgent but wifi connections and tracking tools can be scarce. And it wasn't the first time Berns had been stymied by limited technology—conducting health surveys for the World Health Organization in 2013 on the Iraq/Syria border, she found the process unacceptably slow.

Berns co-founded Dharma, a software platform designed to make it easier for responders and others to gather and analyze information about people