Raising literacy levels through innovation: Sault tech entrepreneur seeks backing for literacy app.

• Position: NEWS

Starting this November, Sault Ste. Marie resident Melissa Kargiannakis will be one of nine women entrepreneurs attending a startup accelerator program in Silicon Valley, Calif.

Kargiannakis, 26, is the only Canadian to be accepted into the Women's Startup Lab (WSL) Accelerator Program, and through the fall she was raising $20,000 to cover the cost of tuition so she and her head of development, Naomi Freeman, could attend.

The program will provide the two women with business guidance, as well as access to mentors and investors, to help start up their tech enterprise, Heuristext.

"The Women's Startup Lab is going to amplify our ability to bring Heuristext to fruition because it focuses on founders as much as company," Kargiannakis said.

"The WSL will prepare us for and provide us with opportunities to pitch to investors who have an appetite for risk, which makes it more likely that we will get the capital we need to take Heuristext to the next level and beyond." Heuristext is an online application that allows people with low literacy to more easily understand information on the internet, while gradually increasing their reading proficiency.

Kargiannakis compares it to Google Translate, but instead of translating text into different languages, Heuristext adapts information to different reading levels.

The app is anticipated to reduce misinformation, while slowly introducing new words to users, increasing their literacy levels, all with the click of a button.

Initially, it will be marketed to health-care providers to get complex, but important, medical information to their stakeholders, but Kargiannakis believes it has a wider application.

"Eventually, I would like everyone who has an internet connection to have access to the technology, and we do have a detailed go-to-market strategy for how we can get it into the hands of everyone with an internet connection," she said.

Born and raised in the Sault, Kargiannakis first envisioned the idea for Heuristext in 2013 while studying for her Master's degree in Health Information Science at Western University.

"What if you could just click a button to make anything you are reading online easier to understand?" she wondered.

By the end of 2015, Kargiannakis had incorporated her company and has since raised $50,000 in grant money for research and development from the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre, the Sault Ste. Marie Economic Development Corp. and the AGE-WELL Network Strategic Impact Program.

She...