iMerciv is a Toronto-based start-up leveraging crowdsourcing and AI to empower pedestrians with personalized navigation and actionable data in real time for safe, convenient, and accessible trips. With the help of fellow pedestrians, always know what’s happening on your sidewalks and get the best routes for you, with our new pedestrian navigation app: MapinHood. Think Waze for Walkers. Navigation was never built for pedestrians. Existing navigation apps are run on routing engines that have been built and optimized for vehicular travel and don’t consider all the variables that can affect pedestrian travel. People are not cars, so why should we navigate like them? MapinHood runs on iMerciv's custom AI routing engine that is built for the flexibility of pedestrian travel, resulting in the most personalized and inclusive navigation experience. For example, MapinHood can generate a user the safest path home at night based on lighting, crime, and accident data. Or provide the most accessible route to a user in a wheelchair using gradient and accessibility relevant data. Our team has bootstrapped MapinHood with revenues from a previous product and was awarded Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility grant to help with the development. The company also recently made the cut for this year’s Next AI cohort – a Next Canada accelerator program. The beta version of the MapinHood app was recently released on the Canadian app stores and is available to download on both Android and iOS. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also just released new updates on MapinHood that help the public practice safe physical distancing via an ‘avoid crowds’ setting in the app, with more features coming that can help with estimating wait times at retailers and empowering vulnerable communities.