Kris Klein - Pollen Sense

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have, uh, Chris Klein with us, uh, today. She's the founder at Pollen Sense. Uh, Chris is a CEO, co-founder, panelist, a presenter, podcast, uh, guest, and mentor. Um, she's a whole bunch of other things, like a Health Wildcatters alum, Connect Capital alum, uh, in Dallas, Texas, travels a lot with her two dogs, uh, today. So Chris, welcome to the podcast. Uh, tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Yeah, thanks very much, Charles. Great to be here. Um, you know, it's, it's been, it's been a great day. I woke up to an order and had some awesome meetings. Um, you know, we're, we're building real-time air intelligence that helps you even in your house if you have pet dander or anything, and it helps people with seasonal allergies and asthma to know what's really in the air. And it also helps workers know if they've been possibly exposed to something that a lab might take 3 months to respond to. So it's a really neat platform, and it's been a busy morning already just sharing all of that information with, uh, the different calls that I've had today.

And how did your, uh, career started at Pollen Sense? Because you were in senior living facilities before, you were in biz dev, right? Tell me a bit more about that.

Yes, I've done a lot of consulting in my history, um, with a big background. The majority of my background's in business development, new business launching in new markets, and working on strategy and partnerships. Um, and a few years ago, about 5 years ago, I was introduced to the company, the original CEO and founder, um, but the timing just wasn't right. And 3 and a half years ago, I was asked to come in and consult for a couple of big expansion markets that go into industrial and indoor monitoring. And, and my background being in what it is, I love looking at the strategy and trying to like solve some of the problems with it. And I was able to see this huge opportunity. So I worked for free for a year actually, and I was doing consulting in senior care and had opened an expansion of a business there. And was doing that full-time and then worked part-time for free for a year because I saw this incredible opportunity and said, you know what, I can make a difference here. And I didn't really expect it, but then in 2024, I was asked to lead sales. So I led as VP of sales and kind of globally with the company because we have global customers, 26 countries. And then we doubled revenue in about a year. And so the end of last summer in '25, the board actually asked me to be CEO to lead the growth, like real growth phase of the company. So I went, I'm like the accidental CEO. It's how I like to— Yeah.

And even if we dig deeper, you were theme park dancer and then a radio host, right? How does that All intertwined.

So I grew up on stage, which I think that has a big impact on sales and relationships and business development, is being able to feel comfortable and present. Uh, so my whole life grew up on stage, lived in a lot of different places, fell into really random opportunities, like with sports radio in a huge market in Atlanta, Georgia. I was on, uh, was a morning show personality, and that was a blast. Um, but then I've done different TV appearances and different spokesperson hosting and all of that. And yeah, my first job after high school was a theme park dancer. Oh, so it was, it was a blast. It really teaches you a lot of, um, a lot of work ethic that you don't know just naturally. Um, we worked 6 days a week, 5 shows a day at the age of 18, you know, 19, 20. It's That's a lot of pressure and it's a lot of work. So you learn really young, just a high, strong work ethic.

Yeah. Right. And like deal with the pressure, which is very useful when you're a founder, right? It is stressful. You were founded at some senior facility business. Is that still ongoing? Are you like full-time in PondSense nowadays?

I'm full-time Paul and Sense. The team with Senior Living Specialist is fantastic, and they've got different affiliates nationally, and then they've got the internal team. So it's very social work driven, an incredible company. I'm still— I was chatting with one of my friends from there today. They're just— it's a great team. So they've been able to manage, and then I was able to go full-time because raising capital Running a growth stage of a startup, managing the sales, growing a team, managing the team, everything really requires, um, double full-time. I mean, it's, it's a good 80 hours most weeks.

And then, Paul, in a sense, right, like, why were you brought in specifically? Like, allergies is a big problem. I have allergies even up to this day, not just because of my dogs, but just like, uh, the seasons, right? Sometimes there's trees pollinating like crazy. We live next to wood in the mountains, right? So, why is that important to solve?

So, in the US alone, there are 80 to 100 million allergy and asthma sufferers. There are over 400 million globally. But if we just look at the US alone, the current technology, if we just take that market, right, the technology that we've built at Pollensense actually serves a lot of other verticals. But if we just take the outdoor air market, The technology hasn't changed. The method of sampling and monitoring that hasn't changed since the 1950s. It's really outdated. And although it has been the legacy kind of gold standard, at best— well, at minimum, not at best, at minimum, they have to sample 3 days a week and they only have about 30 to 40 live stations across the country.. And if you're sampling one time a day and you're doing that 3 to maybe 5 times a week, then the data's always gonna be delayed. So if you are actually affected by what's happening in the air right now, you're gonna get data that's 3 days old. If you go on pollen.com or some of these other sites for weather and stuff, their data's really old and it's modeled and you don't know where it's actually coming from. So with Pollen Sense, we were able to, to correlate and directly tie this hourly impact of data to the impact on human health. So now we're able to forecast and deliver this data every hour to every couple of hours. So severe sufferers are able to see maybe it's not just pollen because we can also identify mold and wildfire smoke and microplastics. So maybe it's something else that's really impacting your health. And for the first time, no one else has had this kind of technology. Now we can put it in the hands and the data to those that are really suffering.

Right. And who do you sell to? Um, there's like the AQI on my Apple Watch, right? The air quality. Um, would you sell to Apple and their algorithms? What's, uh, what's the, the business model here?

So we have a hybrid business model. Um, our meteorology or broadcast news partners, so KY3 TV in Springfield or WFAA in Dallas, WITN in North Carolina. Those customers are hosting the physical sensor that's collecting the data. And then they're putting that out with a weather report for their viewers. Then we also have our network of that, of cloud-based sensors. So the entire network is reporting hourly and we interpolate between the sensors. And then we model that with weather and relative humidity and some other data points. And we have a forecast of that data. So we license that to the big tech data whales. And I would absolutely love to connect with Dark Sky. I think that would be great. I would love to work with Apple and Dark Sky, um, WeatherBug. So we work with Microsoft Bing, and, um, we have an ongoing relationship with the research arm of NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So they've been doing some research validation alongside of our data, and we'll have some, some publications coming out this year on that.

And is it like an API call they would have to pay per call to your API? Also, can you double-click on how you capture that data? Like, how is— is there captors in the air, like at various locations in various cities in the world? Because if I'm right next to a park, right, like with a lot of trees, I might not get like any allergy symptoms, vs. if I'm in a skyscraper 500 meters in the air.

Yeah, that's true. So our sensor is about the size of an old lunchbox. It's 3.2 kilograms or 7 pounds, and it is an optical sensor. So what we do is the particles flying by the air, there's a fan that will pull the particles passing by into a— into the sensor and trap on a tape. And so we collect— we actually collect the particles from the air, and then it moves around, and then there's a microscope on board, and we have a light technique. So we have patents, 6 patents on our imaging and collection technique. So what this image is here is about 1,000 pictures from different focal lengths of those particles on the tape. And we do this continuously. We're generating a human-readable microscope slide every 1 to 3 minutes, detecting and then classifying the particles from the air, the type of pollen, mold, and dust. Um, and so we have a network of sensors across 26 countries continuously monitoring or mining this air data. We ingest that and then model that and then do have that in the API. So Forecast API is actually an annual license. You can call that, um, Depending on the level of the license, you could have a daily average, or which we do offer for free to some customers, or you could have hourly, which is what like your AccuWeather and your weather company type of customer who we have conversations with, those customers want that hourly information. So we can go pretty granular on those API calls.

And what's the cost of like all these sensors? Is it cheap? Is it scalable? Or is it like very costly to deploy every time?

It's a medium cost. So your big environmental air sensors, environmental quality air sensors are gonna be $15,000. If it's a PM counter or particle counter that you'll see on that air quality index, they'll use PM counters because that's, or the EPA reference method. So there are a couple of companies that have those, and I believe they're about $2,500 to $3,000 apiece. Um, our technology for just one sensor currently in a professional use is $4,980 annually. But when we go— if you go high volume, or if you have— when you meet a certain threshold, then that number does come down. So we're considered mid-range on price. You can go as a consumer onto, you know, Amazon or something and buy a particle counter for a couple hundred dollars. But again, the problem is with any, any of that technology is they can't tell you what it is. They just tell you there's stuff in the air and maybe there's a lot of stuff. So that's really the difference of like where we come in.

So do you sell these to like governments, right, like that want to sell that data to citizens? Is like maintenance as well on these things?

Yeah, so every 60 days you need to go out and there's a thumbscrew in the sensor. You open it up, um, you power it off and you take the whole tape cartridge out. And we recycle those as part of our sustainability project, um, uh, properties. Um, and then you just reset on your app that you change the tape and you're running. So it's very low maintenance. It requires power and internet um, and that's it. And it runs in harsh conditions 24/7 around the world. We've run up in Norway, uh, in the wintertime, and on the equator year-round, and in South Africa. So in some pretty harsh climates, um, and the sensors performed great. And it is low maintenance, which is awesome. And you don't have to deal with going to a lab and waiting on results and the expense of that when we've got it all in your hands.

And how much do I need of— how much of those do I need per city? Like, let's say in Manhattan, how much do I need to have a clear, accurate view of if there's pollen in the air, if I need to give a warning to my citizens?

And that's a great question. So we do work with a lot of public health agencies, departments of environmental protection and epidemiology, and then even the tribal air communities. And when we're looking at, when we're looking at what kind of data we want to deliver, it really varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. So ultimately, we do want to be able to do such hyper-local identification with the technology, but we start with regional. And so if I'm in the city of Dallas or in Manhattan, then I would look at a few locations. I would do at least 5 sensors in that— look, in that general area, because those are pretty big cities. Manhattan's going to be smaller than Dallas-Fort Worth, um, you know, geographically speaking, like mileage-wise, but there's a dense population and different kind of terrain. So I would do a few around Manhattan. I would do at least 5 around Dallas-Fort Worth. Um, that gets a good regional view. That's not gonna change it neighborhood by neighborhood when we have some trees that were planted in the 1950s that might be male trees or female trees, and then male trees were planted later on. So when you have an older neighborhood, you're gonna have a different type of exposure. So those trees behave differently.

So it's only man trees that emit like all the, the crap that gets my nose running.

The female trees are messy.

So it's just male trees or it's female trees? What's the science?

Uh, female. So the female trees in the 1950s, um, based on what I've learned, the female trees were messy. So urban developers started to plan and plant more male trees so there wasn't— so the, the neighborhoods looked cleaner. But which one emits pollen out of the two boats, or, um, yeah, I honestly, that's an awesome question.

I just know that I can point the fingers at, at males. I'm pretty sure it smells, right? It's like sperm. Um, so do I get a score of like, if I'm a municipal user, right, and I buy, uh, the hardware, and I'm guessing I'm getting a software, some kind of dashboard? Do I get a score of like how, uh, messy it is today? Uh, is that like the output of your platform?

Uh, so if you actually have a sensor, then you can see minute by minute, or you can have hourly reporting of what's going on live. So there's a live stream of the data, um, and then you can have the forecast as well. So our news stations are soon getting a forecast for a couple of days, and then we're soon going to release a 5-day forecast. Usually the extended forecast, even when it comes to weather, um, you know, the accuracy really drops significantly. Um, so we've always held tight to the, um, the need of delivering accurate forecasts in real-time data, but I know that the weather provider sources really want an extended, so we're modeling that right now too. But you get hourly, which you're not waiting days for a lab and you're not waiting, you know, days for somebody in the area to hopefully go and collect a sample. And then that sample is just that one-time snapshot of the day and it's delayed. So how does it help you today or even tomorrow?

And let's say there's a pollen alert. What can consumers do? They just like pop more uh, histamine pills? Is that like the, the play, or they just stay inside if it's that bad?

Yeah, so like, I, I'll take myself for example. I'm allergic to mold, um, and some pollen, um, but I never knew why I would get sick certain times of the year. For like year over year, I just kept thinking, oh, it's just my, my annual like bronchitis, like annual sickness. But really, with being able to see the data— so PollenWise is our allergy app. So I can look on PollenWise and I know how I can plan my day. So I know if I'm going to go out to the lake and go for a run, then I do want to take an antihistamine or something if I'm going to expose myself longer. Or maybe I wait until the next day when the levels are going to be lower so I don't have to over-medicate. And then, I can also look back in history and say, "Okay. Well, am I feeling sick or am I just having a reaction that's kind of a delayed reaction from the exposure and I'm not sick, it's just allergies?" Then, you just— with more information, I mean, we're tracking everything in our world. We track our steps. We track so much, but we're not tracking the air that we breathe and how it could be impacting our health.

What's the yearly cost of allergies? Have you measured that for the US government, for example?

Oh, it's billions. There's billions on, on health and missed work days. It's the number one reason that kids miss school is asthma. And there's not— so many people don't have the, the data. That's been our whole push, and that's why we're working so closely with a lot of the news stations now, is to grow that network and to grow that awareness so that a parent getting ready with their kid for school that day can see what's going on and prepare in advance. Or there's a lot that's around thunderstorm-induced asthma that's being studied right now that people aren't aware of. And if you don't have asthma, you can actually develop it from reactions to thunderstorm-induced. There's a lot of scientific research that's starting in that space, and they're really interested in the way that our technology can support that now.

Billion seems like a rounding error. What's the percentage of people that suffer from allergy from pollens? Like, how much people in the population? I would guess like 1 out of 4, 1 out of 3.

Yeah, yeah, about a third.

Then it's way more than billions because I read a stat here. It's at around 260 $60 that people spend on pills and allergy per year, and a third of the US population is like 100 million, uh, so you add like two zeros to that, that's like $20, if not $50 billion per year. Like, Google returned $2 to $3 billion, that's not factual. So if the government— and governments pay for these pills, right? Sometimes like governments subsidize, uh, that, like they pay for it. So If governments can use your platform, they would actually pay less per citizen. Is that correct?

Yeah. So they, um, so who's paying for it is all of us. So our taxes go into subsidized healthcare and our insurance rates go up because we're paying for people when they get sick. And that's a group thing. So our whole healthcare system and all of our costs go up. So this data is important for everyone to be able to be aware because it causes chronic inflammation. It causes disease. 25% of heart disease is actually attributed to poor air pollution or poor air quality. So it's affecting your lungs, your heart, your brain. It's like some of it, it's deep lung. So when we go to PM2.5 and stuff, those particles are deep lung. They're not coming out. So the more exposure we have to this and these sticky particles, the pollen and the mold are sticky, so you can think of it as a carrier agent to some of the air pollution that's out there with different gases and carbon emissions and all of that. So it's hitching a ride on that sticky particle and being delivered deeper into our lungs and causing us to get sicker. So respiratory illness is on the rise. It's really incredible. And there's no slowing it down. It's only going to increase. And then to make it even worse, not to be like doomsday here, but to make it worse, our indoor air, the EPA estimates, is 2 to 5 times worse than breathing outside. And we spend like 90% plus of our time indoors.

And is that like, I mean, that stat might be valid like in New York, right? Where you're in like a condo and you're stuck with like indoor air and there's nowhere for the air is circulating less. Yeah, I want to come back on the, the disease side of things you mentioned. So you can get a cold from getting allergies, that what you're saying? Like, uh, yeah, on that, yeah, you can.

Um, so I, I'm allergic to cedar, cedar pollen, mountain cedar, and it's in, it's pretty, um predominant in Texas in the late fall and early winter. And, I would get exposed, you know, being outside playing in the leaves, whatever, get exposed. And then, I would get a bacterial infection or not viral but a bacterial infection. So then, you have an upper respiratory infection because you're not managing the symptoms and the congestion and stuff. So, So then that turns into upper respiratory infection. For me, would just in turn turn into bronchitis. Uh, and then I'd have to take a steroid. And then some people with allergies and asthma, they're on steroid medication, and that steroid medication causes inflammation. And when you're in a state of chronic inflammation, your body is more open to diseases.

Interesting. Yeah, um, I was born asthmatic myself, right? So there's like immune system in there, there's allergies, there's air quality. But I don't think the air was a problem. But there's mold as well, right? Like mold is, uh, it's quite important, can be lasting as well, can stay in your lung for quite some time, right?

Yeah, yeah, mold is on the next frontier of monitoring with our technology. So we are the the data source for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America top 100 allergy capitals. We've been that data source for 5 years, and we've had conversations with them as we look to the future of building that report and starting to incorporate mold. A lot of people with mold sensitivities and mast cell disease will come to us seeking a solution because we're the only technology that can deliver this kind of information.. And we've actually been able to help some families. One family in Wisconsin, her, her elementary school son, as soon as they go outside, there's a conservatory behind their house. Soon as he goes outside, he reacts. All the kids in the neighborhood get sick too. And nobody could figure out why. They went to 12 doctors. So I'm sure you could understand being asthmatic too. Like this poor kid is just going to doctor after doctor, getting all these tests, trying to figure out what's causing his reactions. So, we worked together and in 2 weeks, she was able to identify some spikes and it was mold and it was exponentially higher than everywhere else in the country, even in New York where there is a lot of mold, exponentially double the levels, and it directly tied in that spike to her son's trigger. And so, they took this information to their main doctors and then they tweaked the medication and he's had better quality of life, sense. And they're working with the state and the city to kind of clean up some of the debris in that, in that wooded area, so that way it can keep the levels down and the kids have less exposure.

Right, makes all kinds of sense, right? Like, every second of the day we're breathing something, right? It's time that we have more data about that, um, especially the biohacker community. Like, people are starting monitoring that and the importance Pretty sure you follow like Bryan Johnson's hair protocol. He lives like in LA, which is quite polluted, but inside he has all these HEPA filters and all of that. Thanks for coming on, Chris. Where can people find out more about you?

So our website is Pollensense.com and I can be contacted through that. Or of course I can be found on LinkedIn. A lot of people seem to track me down there, but it's just Chris Klein, my first name and last name. Yep, or just Chris at Pollen Sense if somebody has a question or wants to discuss, you know, possible solution.

That was, uh, Chris and Charles Cormier.