The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2015
Rescue Forensics' YC W15 bet: tracking online sex ads to find victims
YC W15 startup gives police search tools to track online escort listings; nine victims rescued and hundreds of US and European agencies onboard by March 2015.
Rescue Forensics
What the business is
Rescue Forensics builds search software that helps law enforcement collect, track and document escort listings that quickly appear and vanish on Craigslist and other sites, so agencies can find victims and keep evidence usable in court.
Starting capital：$80,000 seed round to cover server costs and travel.
How it started
About a decade before the 2015 profile, an 18-year-old Ryan Dalton helped a friend build a halfway house for women working in Reynosa, Mexico's red-light district and watched a cartel member hit a woman and order her back. During law school he started the anti-trafficking department of the nonprofit Operation Broken Silence and testified in hearings that changed 29 laws and amendments in Tennessee, and he saw trafficking leave the streets for the Internet. After law school he and co-founder Brandon Hamric worked part-time on tools that filter, track and record escort listings for suspicious behavior involving minors, applied to Y Combinator, and vowed to quit their jobs and go full-time if accepted.
What happened
Rescue Forensics joined YC's Winter 2015 class. The software is offered free: it indexes and documents online listings across a region, and investigators decide what constitutes trafficking. By the 2015-02-20 TechCrunch profile, nine victims had been rescued; the first was a 16-year-old moved from Dallas to San Antonio to Amarillo, whose movements Rescue Forensics helped track before a sting. A few hundred state and local agencies in the US and Europe were using the tool, and the founders had raised $80,000 in seed funding for servers and travel, with plans for premium features and new tools for other crime areas.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
About a decade before founding Rescue Forensics, 18-year-old Ryan Dalton was helping a friend build a halfway house for women in Reynosa, Mexico's red-light district when he watched a cartel member hit a woman; he did not yet know to call it sex trafficking, only that it was wrong. During law school he started the anti-trafficking arm of the nonprofit Operation Broken Silence and testified in hearings that changed 29 laws and amendments in Tennessee, and he watched the trade move online. 'Human trafficking is no longer on the streets... It's gone to the Internet,' he said.
After law school, Dalton and co-founder Brandon Hamric worked part-time on tools that filter, track and record escort listings for suspicious behavior involving minors, and applied to Y Combinator with a vow to quit their jobs if accepted. Rescue Forensics became a YC Winter 2015 company: search software that helps law enforcement collect and document online listings that can appear and vanish on Craigslist or other sites across a region, without the company itself judging what is trafficking.
The software was free to agencies, and by the 2015-02-20 TechCrunch profile nine victims had been rescued — the first a 16-year-old moved from Dallas to San Antonio to Amarillo, whose movement officers tracked before a sting — with a few hundred state and local agencies in the US and Europe using it. By Demo Day on 2015-03-24, customers included the FBI, DHS, DOJ and LAPD. The founders had raised $80,000 in seed funding for servers and travel and planned to return to Tennessee to build premium features plus tools for drug trafficking and terrorism recruitment.
What has to be true
- Dalton watched trafficking up close in Mexico and spent law school fighting it, so he saw the shift to the Internet before most police tooling existed.
- The free-to-agencies model removed budget barriers, letting a tiny startup spread to hundreds of departments, including the FBI, DHS, DOJ and LAPD.
- Rescue Forensics refused to judge which listings were trafficking, leaving that to investigators — the trust that keeps its evidence usable in court.
- Each documented rescue (nine by March 2015) made the mission tangible and the premium-features path credible.
What can be applied
Seeing a problem firsthand and staying out of investigators' judgment calls built trust; documenting rescues made a free tool for agencies the wedge to a real business.
Aftermath
As of 2015-03-24 Rescue Forensics was finishing YC W15 with nine rescues credited to its software and free adoption by a few hundred US and European state and local agencies, plus federal customers including the FBI, DHS, DOJ and LAPD; Dalton and Hamric planned to return to Tennessee, add premium features and expand into drug-trafficking and terrorism-recruitment cases.
Sources
- Software Eats Sex Trafficking: YC's Rescue Forensics Aids Law Enforcement In Finding Victims
- 47 Startups That Launched At Y Combinator Winter 2015 Demo Day 2
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