a serial perpetrator detection tech company is shutting down.

Callisto Vault is a revolutionary tool that matched victims of sexual assault with resources, and detected serial perpetrators from reported assaults. The non-profit that owned it announced yesterday, after 10 years of operations, that they were shutting down. How did this technology fail to sustain itself in the market, and what does this say about the rest of tech for good funding?

First and foremost, prior to the thoughts I will share, I have a very big soft spot for Callisto. It was founded around the time I founded Verena (a security system tool), and was an organization I deeply looked up to and watched evolve over time. To write about this and to know they are closing is a devastation. It seems unconscionable in this day and age where we keep on finding serial predators and wondering why we never uncovered them sooner, that a technology that does just that is gone.

From the top: Callisto is/was a non-profit organization that was founded in 2016 by Jess Ladd. They built a technology where victims could go to report their assault and to see options they had. The technology on the backend would look at the reportation data given by the victims to determine any serial perpetrators. The idea is that when multiple people report the same person's information, someone reaches out and handles the match. It was not described what the outcome of this would be, but one would imagine stronger sexual assault cases, and removing of these perpetrators from the college campuses that Callisto served.

Yesterday, Callisto posted a blog explaining that they were closing. However, this is not the first time Callisto has experienced financial troubles. 2 years ago, they reached out to the community to crowdfund enough money to stay open after almost coming close to financial issues. In this last post, they explain again that 2 separate funding opportunities had ceased to take fruition in the way they expected. Moreso, they connected this to a greater trend (one that I cannot comment on as I don't operate in the space anymore) of lack of funding for adult survivors. In their shutting down post, they discuss how most funding in the space is not earmarked for adult survivors, but moreso child victims, or victims of human trafficking.

A snippet from Callisto's blog.

Although devastating, this news is not surprising. Tech for good has long, long struggled with funding that does not meet the flexibility or demands of software products. These products occupy a weird place: software is best used and developed for broad, multi-faceted issues and groups. Often, the ROI is not there for more niche software products that will not see a large amount of users. However, foundations and other donors often do not have the appetite to fund so many broad groups.

Even then, most non-profit founders will know that donation money follows emotional viscerality. This means that a lot of money flows towards the most dire of issues, no matter how niche they are. Child kidnapping, humanitarian aid in war-torn countries, etc are all a bit more morally and ethically straightforward than other forms of charity. Most emotionally visceral problems get a lot of attention and funding: they pull at heartstrings, they are morally straightforward and do not require greater introspection on who receives charity, and there is a direct benefit to giving. Government funding historically has filled this in-between gap, but funding for non-profit services has been slashed, and has never been to the point of abundance regardless.

Tech for good products, which can serve mass amounts of people who may be going through morality ambiguous situations (like homelessness, etc) are less so desired points of funding. To that point, I even had family members refuse to give money to my tech non-profit because the security system that served abuse victims was also tailored towards the LGBTQ+ community.

In this sense, there is a lack of generalized funding for the 'rest' of us: those who are hurting, who would benefit from a product, but who are not in the most dire circumstances or emotionally gutwrenching situations. My non-profit sat there (and ran out of money), and so now does Callisto. The truth is, we do not have software products that would be massively beneficial for humanity on a broad scale because funding institutions are not often ready to fund products with such flexibility and broad scale. Even when companies do try to build these solutions, the pitfalls can be so great that they are blindspots in and of themselves. Crisis Text Line tried to create a spinoff, Loris, that took their crisis data and applied it to customer service chatbots as a stream of for-profit revenue. People collectively lost their shit (rightfully so), due to the ethical issues with lack of consent.

However, the greater issue is often the lack of clear capacity building funding for these non-profits. The issue is not that we don't have the solutions to care for people at scale, or that we don't have ideas on how to make 'tech for good' happen. The problem is no one really wants to pay for it.