She decided the most overlooked hospital in America was the restaurant kitchen sink - and built a device to watch it.
Walk into a kitchen running PathSpot and you will find a small box bolted next to the handwashing sink. Wash, then hold your hands under it. The device bathes them in specific wavelengths of light, the kind that make invisible contaminants auto-fluoresce, and a custom algorithm reads what comes back. Green: all clear. Red: rewash. No clipboard, no honor system, no poster reminding anyone to scrub for twenty seconds. Just a number, in real time, on the one moment of hygiene that food safety actually hinges on.
That box is the HandScanner, and Christine Schindler invented it. She is the co-founder and CEO of PathSpot, the company turning the oldest piece of public-health advice on earth into measurable data. The pitch sounds almost too plain to be a venture: make handwashing trackable. The execution is anything but. Behind the green light sits optics, machine learning, a hardware supply chain, and a founder who built the first version of the algorithm on nights and weekends in her apartment bathroom.
She is a Duke-trained biomedical engineer who studied global health, and she did not arrive at restaurants by way of restaurants. She arrived by way of Mount Kilimanjaro.
As a biomedical engineer and with my passion for public health, I felt like there had to be a technical solution.Christine Schindler
Early in her career Schindler worked in developing countries, designing equipment that had to survive conditions most engineers never plan for: no air conditioning, no reliable electricity, no internet, sometimes no proper shelter. Near the Kilimanjaro region she helped build durable, affordable hospital tools and cancer-detection technology for places where a broken machine could not simply be replaced. The constraint was the teacher. When the budget is near zero and the stakes are life and death, you learn to make simple things that work.
Then she came back to the United States expecting that gap to close behind her. Instead she kept seeing foodborne illness outbreaks in the news, traced again and again to the same unglamorous culprit: people not washing their hands well. Here was a wealthy country with the same problem she had been solving abroad - a missing, affordable, medical-grade fix for an everyday danger. She decided the answer was not another sign on the wall. It was instrumentation.
PathSpot was born from that refusal to accept the poster as the state of the art. If you can measure a thing, you can manage it. Handwashing had never been measured. So she set out to measure it.
The least likely place to start a hardware company is a one-bedroom apartment. That is where this one started.
For months Schindler developed PathSpot's scanning algorithms after hours, hunched over improvised equipment in her apartment bathroom, the one room with the right kind of mess tolerance. The early hardware was, by her own account, dangerous - prototypes that caught small fires and threw electrical hazards before the design settled into something safe enough to mount beside a sink. Founders love to sand these stories smooth. She tells them with the scorch marks left in.
Before betting her life on it, she walked into restaurants and asked operators directly whether they would want this. Enough of them said yes that she stopped hedging.
She quit her job, sold her car, and bought a 3D printer. The car money bought iterations. The printer turned a side project into a workbench.
Rather than perfecting in private, the team shipped version after version into real kitchens and rebuilt around the feedback. Building it in isolation, she has said, "would have been totally wrong."
Restaurants kept asking for data. So PathSpot grew dashboards - compliance rates, washing frequency, and a "hand washer of the week" leaderboard that turned hygiene into a game.
It would have been totally wrong to build it without constant market validation.On developing the HandScanner with restaurants, not at them
An employee washes and holds their hands under the wall-mounted unit. The whole interaction takes about two seconds.
Specific wavelengths make contaminants the eye cannot see auto-fluoresce. The unit captures what reflects back.
A custom model filters and reads the signal, then shows green for clear or red for rewash - and logs it to a dashboard.
Figures as reported by PathSpot and in coverage of the company; performance varies by location.
PathSpot incorporated in August 2017. By the time the pandemic arrived, Schindler had spent years arguing that handwashing deserved real measurement, often to rooms that found the idea quaint. Then, almost overnight, the planet started chanting her thesis back at her.
After March 2020, demand and inbound interest spiked by roughly 500 percent. She raised more capital, leaned into hiring and customer support, and shipped not just hardware but the marketing materials and implementation guidance restaurants suddenly needed. In May 2020 PathSpot closed a $6.5 million Series A led by Valor Siren Ventures, with FIKA Ventures and Walden Venture Capital joining, on top of earlier seed funding.
It's surreal to turn the radio or the TV and hear 'wash your hands for 20 seconds.'Christine Schindler, 2020
Biomedical research with Engineering World Health, building low-cost medical and cancer-detection tools abroad; later, the Innovation and M&A team at Cigna.
Co-founds PathSpot with fellow Duke biomedical engineer Dutch Waanders, who becomes CTO. Algorithms get built in her apartment bathroom.
Selected for the Project Entrepreneur accelerator class, part of a push to back more female founders.
Closes roughly $4M in seed financing and brings on restaurant-industry veterans.
Closes a $6.5M Series A led by Valor Siren Ventures amid a pandemic-driven demand surge.
Named a Rising Star in Hospitality Technology's Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards.
In college she started Girls Engineering Change, a nonprofit aimed at the lopsided male-to-female ratio in STEM.
The model is hands-on by design: bring young girls onto college campuses, have them build low-cost health devices, then donate those devices to communities that need them. The lesson lands twice - the girls see that engineering is creative and useful, and someone, somewhere, gets a tool that helps. Schindler's frustration is specific and worth quoting in full.
We need to change the perception of what an engineer is. If you ask young girls what they want to be when they grow up, they'll often pick very altruistic careers, but never consider engineering. They don't know how creative, impactful, and interesting what I do is, so a lot of the work I do with the girls is just changing this misconception.Christine Schindler, on Girls Engineering Change
It is the through-line of her whole career, really. Engineering as an act of care. The HandScanner and the nonprofit are the same idea pointed at two different rooms.
She tells the PathSpot story in her own words.
The whole device rests on a simple trick of physics: contaminants you cannot see will glow under the right wavelength. PathSpot just learned to read the glow.
Co-founder and CTO Dutch Waanders is also a Duke biomedical engineer. The company is, in a sense, a Duke BME lab that escaped into the restaurant industry.
The first working algorithms came together on improvised gear in her apartment bathroom - small fires and all - before anything resembling a product existed.
PathSpot keeps its headquarters at 115 Broadway, a few blocks from where it raised the money to scale.
Christine Schindler saw a data problem worth solving - and turned the oldest advice in public health into a green light you can trust.