I would like to nominate my app BraidsTribeApp, a mobile platform empowering Black women and communities to learn, share, and access beauty and entrepreneurial skills, for consideration in your awards.
Why BraidsTribeApp deserves to be recognized:
Empowering marginalized communities: By providing accessible tutorials, stylist directories, and business resources, the app supports economic empowerment and self-sufficiency among underrepresented entrepreneurs.
Community-driven impact: Users not only learn DIY beauty skills but also gain opportunities to connect with local stylists, build businesses, and create networks that strengthen grassroots economies.
Leveraging technology for a just purpose: The app uses tech to bridge information gaps, provide practical education, and foster economic inclusion, aligning with the spirit of using technology for a more equitable world.
We believe BraidsTribeApp embodies the Hard Reset mission of using technology to create a more racially and economically just system and would be honored to be considered for recognition.
VocalMD is a direct virtual care platform - you don't have to be hospitalized, seen in a walkin clinic, or become institutionalized to connect long term with a doctor. On VocalMD, we care for patients virtually wherever they are, and find inroads for care via referrals, care management, chronic condition management.
Our goal is to advanced care plans for the unhoused, expanding on pilot studies done in NJ, as well as treat and provide accesss for the substance use disorder patient population. Goal: obtain access for all 800,000 homeless patients to direct virtual care including a full spectrum care team of primary care, behavioral health, specialists, social work, substance use disorder, as well as non-profit collaboration for full circle 360 degree care, without entering a hospital when possible.
We seek to raise $3M to fund our 2nd stage of operational rollout, and expand in NJ and CA.
We are a non-profit focused on wildlife conservation. Our app, wpsWatch, lets volunteers and wildlife rangers help identify threats to wild animals in the field, such as poachers, snares, wildfire, etc. We have helped to save, via tech, the lives of thousands of animals.
The internet is changing. Age verification is becoming more common and pervasive. Why should we offer our identity to use a public utility?
The current industry standard is to collect sensitive personal data—a model that violates privacy and concentrates power. NotMyPii leverages EKG readings from wearables (apple watch, oura ring, garmin, whoop, fitbit, etc) to predict user age without requiring a government id. This allows internet users to retain their pii while fulfilling the requirement of internet companies.
We are a small pre-seed startup who have built a proprietary model. We are seeking our first customers and positive press would be greatly appreciated. Our website can be found at https://notmypii.com/
I’d like to nominate my company, Coffee Brain (coffeebrain.app), for the Hard Reset Awards.
Coffee Brain is a farmer-first, AI-powered coffee trading marketplace created with one clear mission: to put the power of pricing, data, and access back into the hands of coffee farmers especially smallholder growers who have long been left out of the global value chain.
The idea was born from a deeply personal place: growing up in a coffee-producing family in South India and witnessing firsthand how farmers are too often at the mercy of middlemen, volatile markets, and opaque systems. Coffee Brain was started to change that by building tools for transparency, fairer pricing, direct market access, and proven selling strategies while also helping farmers navigate global trends with AI-powered insights.
At its core, Coffee Brain is being built for farmers, for communities, and for the future of coffee that respects the people who make it possible. By tackling one of the most unequal parts of the global supply chain, it gives producers the ability to secure fairer pricing, access transparent markets, and gain real control over their harvest and money. It stands as a clear example of how technology can help build a more economically just world by amplifying voices that have too often been overlooked.
Let’s talk about Nvest! Senyaku Tech’s flagship product. An all in one real estate platform with a “zero to hero” model.
Know nothing about real estate? That’s perfect. Learn everything about real estate and put that knowledge to use within the same platform with risk free, simulated investments. As you build the confidence and strategy you need, users can then make real world investments within Nvest, with very little barrier of entry.
I want to nominate my company, Medusa AI - medusaai.co, for taking a different direction from the current AI industry's direction toward black box systems. When I started building Medusa AI, I was frustrated watching how the AI industry was heading toward models that lacked transparency, explainability, and access.
Instead of following that trend, I chose to build our entire platform around symbolic AI, and neuro-symbolic architectures, these are types of AI models that delivers transparent, explainable solutions where every reasoning step is much more traceable. We have and are creating products that directly provides a new way of how AI-assisted development currently works. Our main product is a code generation tool that focuses on providing the logic of the AI so a user can verify it before it gets converted into code.
This approach represents more than just a technical choice, it's a fundamental rejection of the "trust us" mentality that has come to define modern AI development. This isn't just about better code, it's about preserving human agency in an increasingly automated world. By making AI reasoning transparent and verifiable, we're hoping to remove technical barriers. We aim to democratize AI and technology by allowing users regardless of technical skill to learn and understand how the AI is reasoning and how it reached certain outputs.
I want to nominate Eye On Surveillance (@eos_nola) for leading community efforts to form a coalition opposing live facial recognition in New Orleans. This ordinance, if approved, would have led to New Orleans becoming the first city with citywide biometric live facial recognition, a technology that has consistently been found to misidentify people of color, leading to their criminalization. Thanks to the community organizing of EOS and other partner coalitions, the ordinance was withdrawn! EOS conducted extensive community outreach, political education, and meetings with council members, among other initiatives, to foster the community's understanding of the harms of facial recognition and the fact that surveillance isn't safety!
I would like to nominate my friend, Sabina Hemmi, co-founder & CEO of GLP Winner (glpwinner.com), for both categories 1 and 5. Her work in healthcare advocacy and GLP-1 accessibility shows how technology can be used tp challenge entrenched structures in medicine and push back against profit-first norms in the pharmaceutical industry.
Sabina created GLP Winner as a review and resource platform to help people navigate GLP-1 weight-loss and metabolic treatment by connecting them to existing clinics and providers with transparent pricing. In doing so, Sabina tackles pharmaceutical price opacity, misinformation, and the exclusion of underserved populations from these life-changing therapies.
Sabina's outspoken advocacy also shapes the public conversation. She has been quoted in major outlets such as NPR, Bloomberg, and USA Today, and she has broken multiple under-reported GLP-1 news stories around supply chains, pricing tactics, and compounding access.
I think her career shift from video game analytics to the highly regulated healthcare space also shows real courage. She left a comfortable, successful domain to take on pharma and health access. It's area with massive incumbents, legal risk, and real human stakes.
Sabina isn’t just building a company. She’s advocating, exposing, educating, and fighting for fairness. She is exactly the kind of technologist these awards were created to honor, and I'm exceptionally proud to nominate her.
I’d like to nominate BellyMD, a company reimagining how we treat disorders of gut–brain interaction like IBS, cyclic vomiting, and cannabinoid hyperemesis.
For decades, millions of patients have been told “everything is normal” despite disabling pain, nausea, and other symptoms. These conditions are dismissed as psychological or “not real,” leaving patients without answers or care. BellyMD exists to correct that blind spot.
We have a digital platform that turns lived experience into insight, and with new therapeutics in development, BellyMD is restoring trust to patients who’ve been shut out of medicine. The core idea is diagnostic justice—that patients deserve validation and solutions, not dismissal.
BellyMD shows how technology can amplify unheard voices, transform community knowledge into real medical progress, and challenge entrenched power structures in health care.
I’d like to nominate my small but mighty company, Philos.
The world is getting smaller. This is nothing new, but in recent years, America’s outward perspective of the world seems to be defined by isolationism. We rarely talk with people from different cultures any longer - the excitement around China and the rise of globalization we saw in the 2000s and 2010s has been replaced by a zero sum game of hyper competition.
At the same time, advancements in AI technology are forcing us to redefine what it means to think critically. I believe that in the future, creative spaces will pop up in the digital world where we can flex our brains, engage with others, and learn about the perspectives of cultures that are completely foreign to us.
Philos - from “philosophy”, and “philia”, the Greek word for brotherly love - is an LLM-backed translation debate platform where users can talk with people from other countries, all in their native language. It’s targeted at the Swedish, French, and English-speaking markets; places where democracy and free speech thrive. (Sweden is home to the Nobel laureate association; France was the birthplace of the enlightenment.)
Personally, having spoken Chinese for 10 years and lived/worked in Shanghai for 3, I believe that different languages think in vastly different ways. I loved that, and exploring the nuances of Mandarin - the characters centered around ideas of earth, air, trees; the perspectives on collaboration and doing good; the steely determination with which the culture strips your identity away and forces you to rebuild it, piece by piece - it helped me gain a new perspective on life. When I moved back to the states, I felt that something was missing.
My hope is that Philos will enable the next generation of global citizens to be more conscientious of a world where we are all connected, and lead to conversations around democracy, free speech, technology, and the environment.
This won’t be a game changer platform. It may not be used outside of a niche of academics and creatives. But given the state of big tech’s social media reinforcement bubbles, I think giving people a space to think differently is just what our culture needs.
Hello from Love Mobile, The Cell Phone Company That Gives Back! Love Mobile is revolutionizing telecom through a giveback model that uplifts communities across four pillars: education, the environment, community services, and pet adoption and care. Every time a subscriber pays their phone bill, Love Mobile reinvests directly into hyper-local, high-impact initiatives. By making community the primary focus instead of profit, Love Mobile is proving that business can be both purpose-driven and sustainable. Discover more at GetLOVEMobile.com.
MapChat is my startup designed to get people out of the house, with a North Star that no one should be alone unless they choose to be. The platform works by showing what is happening nearby and offering ways to connect once people arrive at a physical third place. We see a unique opportunity because this group, along with much of Gen Z and younger millennials, are among the least trusting and most disconnected (especially straight men). This has had tremendous societal and personal impacts that cannot be overstated.
We also plan to call out the moral failures of modern tech companies in the same style that Colbert used with his presidential run and later Colbert Super PACs, which is why we launched the Substack. Although, we are dead serious about making a viable company that makes a real difference in people's life.
Beyond that, we want to challenge the modern corporate structure to deliver real benefits to the hard side of the network (contributors…like Reddit moderators), our employees, alongside shareholders.
We believe in business as a force to change the world, but we are astounded by the lack of morality and leadership across today’s technology ecosystem.
Climate change is like health for the planet just like we know smoking is bad for our lungs pollution is bad for the planet’s “lungs” So we know stone cold what scientifically will benefit ecological restoration. Thats puregreenai.com an eco oracle and marketplace platform for sustainability. We are excited to participate at puregreenai.com a matching platform for ecoaffiliates and influencers with sustainability vendors of product and services. This is our goto market solution to address creating virility and network effects for a sustainable marketplace. Affiliates connect with vendors and are provided with custom links that pay affiliates when those links are used for purchase. Vendors only pay for success and can determine the best performers for further collaborations with these influencers for social media development. Puregreenai.com provides market services such as automated climate and sustainability evaluations grounded on peer reviewed science the SDGs and climate finance. This bypasses outdated and corruptible legacy systems with trustless onchain commerce.
I would like to nominate my app BraidsTribeApp, a mobile platform empowering Black women and communities to learn, share, and access beauty and entrepreneurial skills, for consideration in your awards.
Why BraidsTribeApp deserves to be recognized:
Empowering marginalized communities: By providing accessible tutorials, stylist directories, and business resources, the app supports economic empowerment and self-sufficiency among underrepresented entrepreneurs.
Community-driven impact: Users not only learn DIY beauty skills but also gain opportunities to connect with local stylists, build businesses, and create networks that strengthen grassroots economies.
Leveraging technology for a just purpose: The app uses tech to bridge information gaps, provide practical education, and foster economic inclusion, aligning with the spirit of using technology for a more equitable world.
We believe BraidsTribeApp embodies the Hard Reset mission of using technology to create a more racially and economically just system and would be honored to be considered for recognition.
Hi Mia, we’ve nominated BraidTribeApp for a Hard Reset Award! We just launched the awards voting, vote here and please share! https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/announcing-the-inaugural-hard-reset
Hi Mia, wanted to let you know that you’ve been nominated! What’s the best way to connect on next steps? Thanks
VocalMD is a direct virtual care platform - you don't have to be hospitalized, seen in a walkin clinic, or become institutionalized to connect long term with a doctor. On VocalMD, we care for patients virtually wherever they are, and find inroads for care via referrals, care management, chronic condition management.
Our goal is to advanced care plans for the unhoused, expanding on pilot studies done in NJ, as well as treat and provide accesss for the substance use disorder patient population. Goal: obtain access for all 800,000 homeless patients to direct virtual care including a full spectrum care team of primary care, behavioral health, specialists, social work, substance use disorder, as well as non-profit collaboration for full circle 360 degree care, without entering a hospital when possible.
We seek to raise $3M to fund our 2nd stage of operational rollout, and expand in NJ and CA.
https://www.vocaldocs.com
We are a non-profit focused on wildlife conservation. Our app, wpsWatch, lets volunteers and wildlife rangers help identify threats to wild animals in the field, such as poachers, snares, wildfire, etc. We have helped to save, via tech, the lives of thousands of animals.
https://www.wildlifeprotectionsolutions.org/
Hi Todd, we’ve nominated wpsWatch. Here's the link for voting, please share! https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/announcing-the-inaugural-hard-reset
Hi Todd - following up here, wanted to let you know that you've been nominated! We'll be sending you a message now.
Thanks Todd, added to the list!
The internet is changing. Age verification is becoming more common and pervasive. Why should we offer our identity to use a public utility?
The current industry standard is to collect sensitive personal data—a model that violates privacy and concentrates power. NotMyPii leverages EKG readings from wearables (apple watch, oura ring, garmin, whoop, fitbit, etc) to predict user age without requiring a government id. This allows internet users to retain their pii while fulfilling the requirement of internet companies.
We are a small pre-seed startup who have built a proprietary model. We are seeking our first customers and positive press would be greatly appreciated. Our website can be found at https://notmypii.com/
I’d like to nominate my company, Coffee Brain (coffeebrain.app), for the Hard Reset Awards.
Coffee Brain is a farmer-first, AI-powered coffee trading marketplace created with one clear mission: to put the power of pricing, data, and access back into the hands of coffee farmers especially smallholder growers who have long been left out of the global value chain.
The idea was born from a deeply personal place: growing up in a coffee-producing family in South India and witnessing firsthand how farmers are too often at the mercy of middlemen, volatile markets, and opaque systems. Coffee Brain was started to change that by building tools for transparency, fairer pricing, direct market access, and proven selling strategies while also helping farmers navigate global trends with AI-powered insights.
At its core, Coffee Brain is being built for farmers, for communities, and for the future of coffee that respects the people who make it possible. By tackling one of the most unequal parts of the global supply chain, it gives producers the ability to secure fairer pricing, access transparent markets, and gain real control over their harvest and money. It stands as a clear example of how technology can help build a more economically just world by amplifying voices that have too often been overlooked.
Thanks so much for submitting this Dia, adding to the list!
Thank you!! Love your publication!
Let’s talk about Nvest! Senyaku Tech’s flagship product. An all in one real estate platform with a “zero to hero” model.
Know nothing about real estate? That’s perfect. Learn everything about real estate and put that knowledge to use within the same platform with risk free, simulated investments. As you build the confidence and strategy you need, users can then make real world investments within Nvest, with very little barrier of entry.
I would like to nominate 48hills.org - the progressive media outlet - for categories 3 and 4
1) Fadi Ghandour from WAMDA capital for supporting Palestinian tech companies
2) Matt Suiche for supporting individuals and organizations from zero day exploit hacks and surveillance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Suiche)
3) wired magazine podcast department for stepping during these dark times
Wired has been on fire.
Super helpful, thank you!!
I want to nominate my company, Medusa AI - medusaai.co, for taking a different direction from the current AI industry's direction toward black box systems. When I started building Medusa AI, I was frustrated watching how the AI industry was heading toward models that lacked transparency, explainability, and access.
Instead of following that trend, I chose to build our entire platform around symbolic AI, and neuro-symbolic architectures, these are types of AI models that delivers transparent, explainable solutions where every reasoning step is much more traceable. We have and are creating products that directly provides a new way of how AI-assisted development currently works. Our main product is a code generation tool that focuses on providing the logic of the AI so a user can verify it before it gets converted into code.
This approach represents more than just a technical choice, it's a fundamental rejection of the "trust us" mentality that has come to define modern AI development. This isn't just about better code, it's about preserving human agency in an increasingly automated world. By making AI reasoning transparent and verifiable, we're hoping to remove technical barriers. We aim to democratize AI and technology by allowing users regardless of technical skill to learn and understand how the AI is reasoning and how it reached certain outputs.
Thanks so much for this, adding Medusa AI to the list!
I want to nominate Eye On Surveillance (@eos_nola) for leading community efforts to form a coalition opposing live facial recognition in New Orleans. This ordinance, if approved, would have led to New Orleans becoming the first city with citywide biometric live facial recognition, a technology that has consistently been found to misidentify people of color, leading to their criminalization. Thanks to the community organizing of EOS and other partner coalitions, the ordinance was withdrawn! EOS conducted extensive community outreach, political education, and meetings with council members, among other initiatives, to foster the community's understanding of the harms of facial recognition and the fact that surveillance isn't safety!
Thanks so much for nominating!! Added Eyes on Surveillance to our list
I would like to nominate my friend, Sabina Hemmi, co-founder & CEO of GLP Winner (glpwinner.com), for both categories 1 and 5. Her work in healthcare advocacy and GLP-1 accessibility shows how technology can be used tp challenge entrenched structures in medicine and push back against profit-first norms in the pharmaceutical industry.
Sabina created GLP Winner as a review and resource platform to help people navigate GLP-1 weight-loss and metabolic treatment by connecting them to existing clinics and providers with transparent pricing. In doing so, Sabina tackles pharmaceutical price opacity, misinformation, and the exclusion of underserved populations from these life-changing therapies.
Sabina's outspoken advocacy also shapes the public conversation. She has been quoted in major outlets such as NPR, Bloomberg, and USA Today, and she has broken multiple under-reported GLP-1 news stories around supply chains, pricing tactics, and compounding access.
I think her career shift from video game analytics to the highly regulated healthcare space also shows real courage. She left a comfortable, successful domain to take on pharma and health access. It's area with massive incumbents, legal risk, and real human stakes.
Sabina isn’t just building a company. She’s advocating, exposing, educating, and fighting for fairness. She is exactly the kind of technologist these awards were created to honor, and I'm exceptionally proud to nominate her.
I’d like to nominate BellyMD, a company reimagining how we treat disorders of gut–brain interaction like IBS, cyclic vomiting, and cannabinoid hyperemesis.
For decades, millions of patients have been told “everything is normal” despite disabling pain, nausea, and other symptoms. These conditions are dismissed as psychological or “not real,” leaving patients without answers or care. BellyMD exists to correct that blind spot.
We have a digital platform that turns lived experience into insight, and with new therapeutics in development, BellyMD is restoring trust to patients who’ve been shut out of medicine. The core idea is diagnostic justice—that patients deserve validation and solutions, not dismissal.
BellyMD shows how technology can amplify unheard voices, transform community knowledge into real medical progress, and challenge entrenched power structures in health care.
Belly-MD.com
I’d like to nominate my small but mighty company, Philos.
The world is getting smaller. This is nothing new, but in recent years, America’s outward perspective of the world seems to be defined by isolationism. We rarely talk with people from different cultures any longer - the excitement around China and the rise of globalization we saw in the 2000s and 2010s has been replaced by a zero sum game of hyper competition.
At the same time, advancements in AI technology are forcing us to redefine what it means to think critically. I believe that in the future, creative spaces will pop up in the digital world where we can flex our brains, engage with others, and learn about the perspectives of cultures that are completely foreign to us.
Philos - from “philosophy”, and “philia”, the Greek word for brotherly love - is an LLM-backed translation debate platform where users can talk with people from other countries, all in their native language. It’s targeted at the Swedish, French, and English-speaking markets; places where democracy and free speech thrive. (Sweden is home to the Nobel laureate association; France was the birthplace of the enlightenment.)
Personally, having spoken Chinese for 10 years and lived/worked in Shanghai for 3, I believe that different languages think in vastly different ways. I loved that, and exploring the nuances of Mandarin - the characters centered around ideas of earth, air, trees; the perspectives on collaboration and doing good; the steely determination with which the culture strips your identity away and forces you to rebuild it, piece by piece - it helped me gain a new perspective on life. When I moved back to the states, I felt that something was missing.
My hope is that Philos will enable the next generation of global citizens to be more conscientious of a world where we are all connected, and lead to conversations around democracy, free speech, technology, and the environment.
This won’t be a game changer platform. It may not be used outside of a niche of academics and creatives. But given the state of big tech’s social media reinforcement bubbles, I think giving people a space to think differently is just what our culture needs.
Hello from Love Mobile, The Cell Phone Company That Gives Back! Love Mobile is revolutionizing telecom through a giveback model that uplifts communities across four pillars: education, the environment, community services, and pet adoption and care. Every time a subscriber pays their phone bill, Love Mobile reinvests directly into hyper-local, high-impact initiatives. By making community the primary focus instead of profit, Love Mobile is proving that business can be both purpose-driven and sustainable. Discover more at GetLOVEMobile.com.
MapChat is my startup designed to get people out of the house, with a North Star that no one should be alone unless they choose to be. The platform works by showing what is happening nearby and offering ways to connect once people arrive at a physical third place. We see a unique opportunity because this group, along with much of Gen Z and younger millennials, are among the least trusting and most disconnected (especially straight men). This has had tremendous societal and personal impacts that cannot be overstated.
I have written more about this here as we begin rolling it out: https://substack.com/@mapchat/p-173901997
We also plan to call out the moral failures of modern tech companies in the same style that Colbert used with his presidential run and later Colbert Super PACs, which is why we launched the Substack. Although, we are dead serious about making a viable company that makes a real difference in people's life.
Beyond that, we want to challenge the modern corporate structure to deliver real benefits to the hard side of the network (contributors…like Reddit moderators), our employees, alongside shareholders.
We believe in business as a force to change the world, but we are astounded by the lack of morality and leadership across today’s technology ecosystem.
Climate change is like health for the planet just like we know smoking is bad for our lungs pollution is bad for the planet’s “lungs” So we know stone cold what scientifically will benefit ecological restoration. Thats puregreenai.com an eco oracle and marketplace platform for sustainability. We are excited to participate at puregreenai.com a matching platform for ecoaffiliates and influencers with sustainability vendors of product and services. This is our goto market solution to address creating virility and network effects for a sustainable marketplace. Affiliates connect with vendors and are provided with custom links that pay affiliates when those links are used for purchase. Vendors only pay for success and can determine the best performers for further collaborations with these influencers for social media development. Puregreenai.com provides market services such as automated climate and sustainability evaluations grounded on peer reviewed science the SDGs and climate finance. This bypasses outdated and corruptible legacy systems with trustless onchain commerce.