Delilah Lanoix fell into the business of helping people get from point A to point B by chance.
At the turn of the millennium, Lanoix and her husband, John Harris, took up an offer to buy a company with a small fleet of vans shuttling patients with disabilities to and from doctors’ appointments and regional centers.
But the business, and the vision behind it, didn’t stay small for long. Lanoix knows how to say “yes, and …,” after all.
“We took that and we grew it to over 200 vehicles, and we serviced all of Southern California,” said Lanoix, who tapped into demand by striking up contracts with care providers and agencies.
As rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft ushered in a new age of transportation, the New Orleans native took it upon herself to ensure riders with extra needs didn’t get left behind. A transformed movement ecosystem called for a new model.
Lanoix now serves as the chief executive of Butterfli Technologies Inc., the downtown-based transportation company she co-founded with Harris in 2017. Butterfli expanded on the duo’s previous venture, which became one of the many small businesses moving riders with disabilities in a new, expanded network of more than 400 vehicles.
Contracts with enterprise clients like hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente, are key to Lanoix’s strategy. A common use case is the transport of discharged patients, she said.
“They need to move that person out of the hospital to prepare a bed for the next patient, and if that person is not transported in a timely fashion, it can cost the hospital quite a bit of money,” Lanoix said, adding that dependable transportation for patients on stretchers is particularly difficult for hospitals to find.
While organizations remain core customers, the boom of on-demand rideshares pushed Lanoix to debut a consumer-facing platform on Butterfli. Comprising a fifth of the company’s business, the platform offers riders with diverse needs a sense of agency, she said.
“We understand the importance of persons being able to access services for themselves,” Lanoix said. “It also gives them a sense of independence.”
Riders who use assistive mobility devices or gurneys can book online or by phone to be paired with drivers from one of
Butterfli’s partner providers. The service proved invaluable to a 107-year-old woman who wanted to go to church on Sundays, Lanoix remembers.
“She was isolated, and it meant a lot to her just to get dressed up and go to church,” she said. “She just needed some care, for someone to come in and pick her up from her home and escort her into the vehicle and then be there to pick her up on time.”
Filling a need
Empathy and an understanding that anybody can develop a disability are the backbones of the work Butterfli does, Lanoix said. Most of the company’s 20-some employees have someone in their life who needs extra help getting around– or a loved one who would’ve benefited from access to rides catered to their needs.
For Sebastian De Vivo, Butterfli’s chief financial officer, it’s a little brother with a disability who needs a ride to the regional center every morning and a grandmother who communicated through food and cherished trips to the Spanish-speaking market.
“Sometimes, I couldn’t (drive her) or my siblings couldn’t do it, and knowing that this was something that could have changed her life was a big deal for me,” De Vivo said.
When he landed in L.A., fresh out of the world of academia, De Vivo was searching for roles that would allow him to make a positive social impact. After a few years of work on regional economic development initiatives in L.A. County, he connected with Lanoix through a friend from business school.
De Vivo was surprised that, at the time, Lanoix was one of the only entrepreneurs fleshing out the idea of making rideshares accessible to users with barriers to mobility.
“I was like, ‘How has this not been done?’” he said.
Soon after their first meeting, De Vivo began advising the company on creating sustainable growth and impact. The way Lanoix has assembled a dedicated team that “gives 100%” from the ground up is inspiring, he said.
“Delilah has a gift to communicate her vision and share it with you and then seamlessly fit you into her mission,” De Vivo said. “To me, that’s a leader.”
Forrest Zhang, who leads a four-person software development division at Butterfli as the company’s chief technology officer, said Lanoix puts a great deal of trust into her coworkers. Since meeting La- noix through mutual acquaintances about five years ago, Zhang said he’s come to appreciate her strong sense of direction.
“She’s the visionary, and I’m the executor,” said Zhang, whose team is creating an artificial intelligence agent that will answer users’ frequently asked questions and help them book rides. “She’s not micromanaging at all; in fact, it’s quite the opposite of her style.”
Partnerships are paramount
In the years since Butterfli’s debut, major rideshare platforms Uber and Lyft have both introduced specialized services for riders with physical disabilities. These include the Uber WAV feature for motorized wheelchairs and wheelchair-accessible Lyft Assisted rides with door-to-door help.
But mainstream apps aren’t really a source of competition for Butterfli, Lanoix said. The company partners with Uber on some of its WAV rides and has stepped in to do the same for Lyft in the past when demand for accessible rides on the platform has outstripped supply.
“Uber and Lyft had both tried to tackle the issue, but the problem with them was that they wanted to deal directly with the driver,” De Vivo said. “There’s too much compliance, and there’s too much work to make sure that the customer gets what they need, because the needs are so var- ied and so important.”
Butterfli’s agnostic approach to serving neighborhoods across L.A. County also gives it a leg up. Rideshare apps’ WAV coverage tends to cluster around densely populated areas, De Vivo said, so riders living outside of central L.A. and the San Fernando Valley might face longer wait times.
Ensuring rides are not only physically accessible but also affordable has been a core tenet at Butterfli since its founding, Lanoix said, and remains so as the company charts an expansion into northern California, Florida and Texas.
Since 2018, Butterfli has offered local residents with disabilities up to a dozen $2 rides per month through the state-funded Access for All program administered by L.A. Metro. It also ran a partnership with the L.A. Urban League, supported by a grant from Honda, for free WAV rides under the LA Navigate Together program.
“(We’re) really trying to figure out how we can serve our customers and connect them with the programs that can help cover that extra mile,” De Vivo said.
