Creating Campus Safety with Servabo

Preena Patel
2/2/2015

Always being an advocate of women’s rights and public safety, Nishana Ismail and Tim Deppen, co-founders of Servabo, wanted to create a device that could easily help increase people’s safety. After friends of the two were mugged on campus, they were prompted to continue brainstorming ways to enhance one’s security. This all inspired their idea for Shadow.

The Shadow team states, “Servabo's Shadow is a Bluetooth enabled, discrete panic button that works through the Shadow smartphone app to provide instant emergency notifications to your personalized network with the press of a button.”

With the Shadow app, you can save various circumstances where you can customize who is contacted and what message is being sent. Once the Shadow button is triggered, your message along with your GPS information will be sent from your smartphone.

With their office located in EnterpriseWorks in Research Park, the Servabo team has been working on Shadow for the past two years and were winners of the 2013 Cozad New Venture Competition. The team states, “The name Servabo derives from the Latin word servāre, meaning to watch over or keep guard.  Our goal is to develop innovations in personal safety technology so that we can create safer communities, campuses, and cities.  We believe that by leveraging the latest advancements in engineering and science, we can create tools which will keep people one step ahead of crime.”

On February 3, 2015, Servabo will be launching their Shadow Indiegogo campaign. Later this year, Servabo hopes to ship out their first orders of Shadow as well as have Shadow on shelves of retail and web stores. 

Servabo is also creating a donation option in their campaign and are partnering with some organizations- Ella Mae Foundation (by Beverly Gooden), YWCA Evanston/ Northshore and RAINN for their charity donations.

Overall, Servabo shares, “We are also working on synergy between campus safety initiatives and Shadow in improving student safety in campuses. Our ultimate goal is to have an impact on the horrible statistic of a violent crime occurring every 26 seconds and 1 in 5 female college students being the victim of sexual assault.”

If you would like to check out Servabo’s crowdfunding campaign, click here.