Meet Michael Becker

The man behind GeoSure, which offers real-time risk assessments for every destination, empowering travelers and locals to explore with confidence.

By Irene Middleman Thomas  »  Photos by Matt Maenpaa

GeoSure is a Boulder-based platform designed to provide users with real-time safety assessments for different locations around the world. It aggregates and analyzes a variety of data sources, including built environment, macroeconomics, crime statistics, health risks, political stability, social media sentiment, user perceptions and more to generate a safety score for a given area. 

This score is presented in a user-friendly format, using color codes and numerical ratings, making it easy for travelers to understand the safety level of a particular destination at a glance. Essentially, it’s like having a comprehensive safety guide that helps travelers and residents alike make informed decisions about where to go and how to stay safe while exploring their own cities or new places.

Michael Becker, the co-founder of GeoSure, guides us through this “culture of safety.”

Describe what makes GeoSure both essential and accessible. 

Our product is confidence and reassurance. If you think of a weather analogy, it is akin to a Fahrenheit or Celsius of safety, albeit with much more information than temperature alone shares. GeoSure partners with leading brands like AIG, Nike, Toyota, Apple, SAP and many more. Partners embed our data via API into their mobile products, dashboards and other digital tools. We believe safety should be accessible and available to everyone, everywhere. Anyone can download the app for free in the Apple App Store or Google Play.

You state that GeoSure is now the world’s most trusted risk scoring standard. Can you describe how your business compares to competitors?

GeoSure created the first quantitative-based, AI-powered, hyperlocal, scaled safety measurement platform, covering seven risk categories. We developed the first-to-market women’s and LGBTQA+ safety experience, making GeoSure’s data among the most granular risk analytics in the world. GeoSure was the first to incorporate a real-time, crowd-sourced, user-perception capability.

Our goal was to differentiate ourselves by first measuring safety, making it granular to the neighborhood level and then turning the traditional marketing model upside down, instead of selling fear and anxiety to empower, inform and engage travel and local safety.

It’s astounding that GeoSure was able to recognize the impending COVID-19 pandemic signals in Wuhan before we all knew what hit us, raising the Health & Medical Risk score for Wuhan to 100, the highest possible, at a time when the Chinese government was reporting fewer than 8,000 cases. GeoSure predicted substantial near-term global impact across more than 130 gateway cities, far ahead of the WHO’s official categorization of COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11. Please describe how this affected your company’s status both on the government and corporate levels.

Our data has a forward-looking aspect using regression and other statistical models. We had risk-modeled Health & Medical from the very beginning. Before the pandemic, however, few inquired about Health & Medical. There was much more intrigue around the quantitative nature of the approach—why hyperlocal was relevant (versus country or city levels) and women’s and LGBTQA+ safety. When the pandemic hit, two things happened: Suddenly, everyone needed a COVID-19 response (we had it), and at the same time, travel went from 60 mph to zero and layoffs and budgets were cut. We helped many folks when they needed it most. The trust and goodwill gained was reciprocated and helped us grow faster than expected.

What inspired you to launch GeoSure and establish Boulder as its base?

I love to tell this story. I loved Colorado and always wanted to live here, ever since I was a kid visiting. 

I had worked in finance and had been investing in and doing my own startups in NYC. I’d always been interested in data, statistics and analytics, combined with a love of travel (sometimes to arcane parts of the world). I saw how difficult, awkward and time-consuming it was to find safety information. I knew if you could measure something, you could create value and solve problems. 

In 2013, I went to the best risk modeler and predictive analytics guy in New York City: Don Pardew, head of the statistics department at Columbia University, who became my co-founder. GeoSure was born on the back of the proverbial cocktail napkin that same day. An opportunity to move to Boulder in 2016 was something I couldn’t pass up. We started with 3,300 locations. Today, we’ve expanded to over 400,000 cities, suburbs, neighborhoods and macro and micro-hoods.

At the end of the day, our goals are to drive more travel, enable job and economic growth and make communities safer. Then, we measure local progress. 

To learn more, visit geosureglobal.com.