Our manifesto
Pediatric health belongs to the people raising the kids.
Ickly is building the early warning layer for childhood illness: community-powered pediatric health intelligence, owned by the parents living it.
What we believe
For a hundred years, pediatric health has been organized around institutions: hospitals that see kids after they're sick, public health agencies that publish data weeks late, schools that email after the outbreak is over. Parents, the people closest to the signal, have been treated as the audience, not the source.
We think that's backwards. The most accurate, most current picture of what's going around any neighborhood already exists. It lives in group texts, pickup-line conversations, and "is your kid out too?" Slack messages. It just hasn't had a home.
Ickly is that home. A new category we call community-powered pediatric health intelligence: thousands of small, anonymous reports from parents, turned into a clear local signal that every part of the health ecosystem can act on.
What we stand for
- Parents first, always. The signal belongs to the families who generate it. Not to insurers, not to advertisers, not to data brokers.
- Early beats exhaustive. A rough heads-up tonight is worth more than a perfect report next month. We optimize for sooner.
- Local beats national. Your kid doesn't catch the national average. They catch what's at their school, on their block, this week.
- Anonymous by design. No names, no photos, no precise locations, ever. Privacy isn't a feature, it's the foundation.
- Endorsed, not extracted. Schools and clinics join as trusted endorsers of the network, not as gatekeepers of the data.
What we're building toward
A world where, the moment something starts circulating at your child's school, you know. Where pediatricians, urgent cares, employers, and public health teams all plug into the same parent-powered signal. Where the midnight Google search ("is this a cold, the flu, or something more?") finally has a real answer, because the community already has one.
We're starting in Chicago, one school and one parent at a time. The radar gets sharper with every report.
Meet the founder
Anna-Mi Widman
Founder
Anna-Mi is a product leader, community builder, and toddler mom living in Ukrainian Village, Chicago. Her experience caring for her sick kids during school outbreaks, while working full time, motivated her to start Ickly.
“I became a mom during the pandemic, and to this date, every time my kids come home sick from school I always want to know what's going around. How is it that we can find almost any information online, but when our kids get sick we have no idea what's going around? Parents share these things informally in calls, texts, and group chats, but there is no product or platform that brings it all together and makes it accessible to all stakeholders of the health community.”
“This causes major inefficiencies in the ecosystem, from parents unsure if they should take their kids to the doctor, to employers not knowing how long a parent will be home with sick children, to pharmaceutical companies struggling to predict sales, and medical providers not able to forecast staffing needs.”
Anna-Mi Widman, Founder
Privacy, by design
- Reports are anonymous. We never collect your child's name, photo, or precise location.
- Data is aggregated. You see neighborhood patterns, not individual households.
- We don't sell personal data, ever. Our business model is paid plans for schools and clinics.
Governance and transparency
We're an early-stage company, and we'd rather show our work than hide behind polished boilerplate. Here's exactly where we stand today.
- Legal entity
- Ickly LLC, registered in the United States. All product, data, and contracts run through this entity.
- Leadership
- Founded and currently led by Anna-Mi Widman. We have not yet appointed additional officers or formal clinical advisors, and we'll name them here as we do.
- Clinical advisors
- None on the masthead yet. We're actively recruiting pediatricians and public health experts to advise on signal quality and parent-facing guidance. Interested? Email us.
- Stage
- Early-stage, founder-led, based in Chicago. Proud members of 1871 and MATTER.
Compliance and data handling
Ickly is a consumer wellness and community information service, not a healthcare provider, so HIPAA does not apply to us as a covered entity. We still design with HIPAA-style safeguards because we're handling family health signal.
- COPPA-aligned. Accounts are for parents and guardians. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13, and child-related fields (age band, school) are entered by the parent and stored without the child's name or photo.
- HIPAA-aware by design. Reports are anonymous, aggregated to ranges, and never tied to a medical record. We're not a covered entity, so we do not sign BAAs.
- Retention. Identifiable account data is kept while your account is active and deleted within 30 days of account deletion. Anonymized, aggregated symptom data may be retained indefinitely for trend history.
- Deletion. You can delete your account and associated identifiable data from the app at any time. Full detail in our privacy policy.
- No sale, no ads, no insurers. We do not sell personal data, run third-party ad targeting, or share identifiable data with insurers, employers, or data brokers. Ever.
Third-party processors
These are the vendors that touch Ickly data on our behalf. The full, current list lives in our privacy policy.
- Supabase: database, authentication, file storage (US region).
- Cloudflare: hosting, CDN, edge compute.
- Resend: transactional and digest email delivery.
- Stripe: payment processing for paid school plans.
- Mapbox: map tiles and geocoding (ZIP-level, never precise address).
- Google Analytics: aggregate page-view analytics only. Google Signals and ad personalization are turned off, ad storage and ad user data consent are denied, IPs are anonymized, and no user identifiers, emails, or report content are sent to Google for advertising.
Get involved
The radar gets sharper with every report. Add yours, follow your school, or tell a friend.