Early this month, Mexico successfully secured $360 Million of catastrophe cover with the World Bank cat bond. The deal is designed to help protect against earthquake and tropical cyclone risks, unfortunately, natural disasters that Mexico is no stranger to.
One look at the website earthquaketrack.com and you can see that Mexico is riddled with earthquakes on daily basis. However, in 1985 Mexico saw one of it’s worst natural disasters to date, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake in the capital which left 10,000 dead. This event had a huge impact on the citizens of Mexico City, including the rising entrepreneur, Alejandro Cantú.
Alejandro Cantu, Founder and CEO at SkyAlert
Cantú is the Founder and CEO of SkyAlert, an App which alerts users of an impending earthquake in real time. According to the website, the technology used by SkyAlert allows the app to send out seismic alerts 120 seconds before the impact of an earthquake, which is 40 seconds faster than other systems.
“I’ve taken the technology to the point where it can save lives in the event of an earthquake, alerting 60 million or more users to the platform I developed,” explains the Mexican entrepreneur to BBC World.
Cantú has also been labelled one to watch by MIT who listed him as one of the world’s top innovators under 35. According to MIT’s website “Only three years after the creation of SkyAlert, it has covered one hundred per cent of the areas under seismic risk in the country and provided service to more than 45 million Mexicans who previously had no access to any earthquake alert system.”
SkyAlert’s website has also announced that it was selected by Forbes magazine as one of the 30 Promises of Business in Mexico. The company also highlights previous achievements like the 2015 National Entrepreneur Award, which saw Cantú receive the award of “High Impact Entrepreneurship,” due to the fact that the SkyAlert app has been downloaded by almost three million people, becoming the most downloaded Mexican App in history.
Mexico is constantly faced with the ever looming threat of being hitting by catastrophic earthquakes, which makes startups like SkyAlert vital for citizens of this huge country. However, it appears the country is in good hands thanks to the innovative creation of Alejandro Cantú.
As the website states, “SkyAlert continues to the technological forefront to protect more Mexicans from the onset of seismic disasters.” Hopefully the citizens of Mexico will not need to use this ingenious app, although if disaster does strike, they should be given a potentially life saving head start.