In the fall of 2010, Erine Gray began a technology company with a task that would have looked familiar to any diligent office worker: filling in a spreadsheet. He rented a small office near his home in Austin, researched local assistance programs and entered the details himself. Then he wrote scripts to get those records into a database. Before anyone could search for help, somebody had to do the typing.
The company was called Aunt Bertha. It would become Findhelp. Its first territory was greater Austin, and its founder supplied both the programming and the data entry. There is something pleasingly unceremonious about that beginning. A project intended to organize a sprawling American system started with a person looking things up, checking details and adding another row.
“I was the only programmer, and the very first data entry person,” Gray recalled. The sentence contains a useful corrective to the usual founding photograph: the person at the keyboard has several jobs, and none comes with an audience.
A search engine, assembled by hand
Gray’s subject was the distance between assistance being available and somebody knowing it was available. Food programs, affordable housing, help with utility bills, transportation: each might exist nearby, yet require a separate hunt. The person doing the searching had to discover the right vocabulary as well as the right organization.
For a programmer, that presented a recognizable information problem. For someone asking for help, it presented a much less abstract afternoon. A directory could make the first part easier. It could put options in view, let someone search by location and replace a collection of disconnected leads with a place to begin.
Gray had already practiced an improvised version of better search. At Indiana University, he used Amazon to identify books because he preferred its search to the library’s. Having found the details, he could go back and locate the book at the library. The retailer had become an unofficial library assistant. It was a small example of the value of making information easier to retrieve.
The economics of a pack of cards
Long before the database, there were sports cards. Gray grew up in Olean, in western New York, and at 11 bought cards from other children to resell at collectibles shops. During college, he sold books door to door. Those ventures gave him an early acquaintance with the rather direct business of persuading somebody to buy something.
He graduated from Indiana University with an economics degree in 2000 and worked in programming and consulting. Austin became his base. His professional experience would eventually include software projects involving Dell, the City of Austin and public-benefits administration. The combination matters: he could write code, but he also spent time around the institutions expected to use it.
In 2004, he completed a Master of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School. His thesis, Leaving Rural America: How Poor Kids Get to College, suggests the kinds of access questions occupying him even then. Getting somewhere depended on more than the existence of a destination.
From 2006 to 2010, he worked at MAXIMUS on Texas public-benefits processes. Applications, call centers and operational improvements supplied a close view of how public programs reached their intended users. An online form might spare somebody an office visit. A better process might spare another person a stalled application. These were changes whose usefulness could be felt without a demonstration stage.
Indiana University
University of Texas
MAXIMUS
Aunt Bertha
Dinner, with a business model
Gray initially considered a nonprofit. Over dinner at Austin’s Fonda San Miguel, he discussed the idea with entrepreneur Gary Hoover. Hoover proposed a different arrangement: make it a business, and avoid competing for scarce charitable money with the organizations it hoped to help.
It was a question about the plumbing beneath the good intention. Somebody would have to pay for the directory’s upkeep. Programs would change, software would need work and employees would need salaries. A service designed to help other organizations could hardly be sustained by enthusiasm alone, however agreeable the dinner.
The model gave individuals free search while charging organizations for software. Those organizations could manage referrals and the work surrounding them. Gray eventually led Findhelp as a public benefit corporation, a business whose public purpose sits alongside its commercial operation.
The early arithmetic was uncomfortable. He went two years without revenue and recalled a point when his bank balance reached $27. In 2016, Aunt Bertha announced $5 million in Series B funding. Between those details sits the less photogenic part of entrepreneurship: continuing to work while the account offers its own concise review.
The Unreasonable Institute supplied another turning point in 2012. Gray met early investors there, and his first $100,000 followed. Later, he wrote candidly about the mistake of expecting investment to make everything easier. The money arrived; the responsibility for making the business work remained.
“Find a problem that you can’t stop thinking about.”
Erine Gray, American Compassion, 2025
His published reflections also contain a fondness for Friday Night Lights, which he watched during breaks from late programming sessions. The film’s doubts and persistence held more practical interest than an immaculate founder legend. He described finding satisfaction in a social worker’s appreciation and in seeing somebody on his team discover something useful.
One early regret was waiting too long to ask other people for help. Being a sole founder could be lonely, and he hesitated to draw friends and colleagues into an idea whose business prospects were uncertain. He subsequently practiced asking for guidance. The builder of a tool for finding assistance had some practice to do himself.
The people inside the database
Gray’s original spreadsheet grew into a research operation. In an account of Findhelp’s earlier years, he described a team dedicated to discovering programs, checking information and keeping records organized. He also described researchers moving into software development, analysis and community engagement elsewhere in the business.
That was an organizational choice as much as a data choice. Research staff could learn the service through its individual entries: what a program offered, how it was described, where a visitor might become confused. The work gave employees a close acquaintance with the product before they moved into other jobs.
A listing carries more responsibility than its size on a screen suggests. A person searching for rent assistance has reason to care whether the instructions are current. An organization taking referrals needs information it can act on. The directory’s quiet maintenance helps determine whether a promising search becomes a useful connection.
The company’s work now extends to managing referrals and benefits enrollment. That broadens the practical question. Finding a program is one step; understanding what to do next and completing the process introduces further opportunities to get stuck. Gray’s career has repeatedly returned to that passage from available information to an action somebody can take.
A seat back in the lecture hall
His interest in the safety net also produced a listening project. American Compassion explores how American assistance systems came into being and what might improve them. A class with journalism professor Marvin Olasky helped inspire Gray’s interest in that history.
The premise has a certain usefulness for a software founder: before redesigning a system, investigate why somebody built it that way. History adds motives, arguments and compromises to what might otherwise look like a collection of forms. It also restores human decisions to institutions that can seem to have existed forever.
In 2024, Findhelp and the LBJ School partnered on live recordings. Rebecca McInroy hosted the conversations, bringing public discussion back to the school where Gray had studied two decades earlier. The sessions were free and open to the public. The audience could watch people examine the system instead of merely being instructed to navigate it.
Gray’s ambitions for the project included drawing attention to people doing consequential work outside the familiar circle of public names. In the 2025 season finale, he joined fellow founders in a discussion of practical improvements. He returned to the advice in the pull quote above: choose a problem that keeps your attention. His own choice had already kept him occupied for years.
Sixteen years after the spreadsheet
On March 3, 2026, TPG announced an approximately $250 million investment in Findhelp through The Rise Funds. The announcement described more than 900,000 verified community program locations and over 800 customers across all 50 states. Gray said the investment would support expansion of the network and further work on the technology.
Dated figures from the investment announcement. Program locations are listings, not a count of people served.
Later that month, he appeared on Hello Longhorn to discuss the software and the safety net. Sixteen years into the company, the public conversation still returned to helping people connect with programs. The national scale had arrived through a succession of smaller tasks, starting with the records he entered himself.
The spreadsheet is worth remembering because it keeps the story proportionate. A search result requires information. Information requires attention. Someone asking for assistance deserves an answer that helps them decide what to do next. Gray began by assembling those answers for Austin. The work has given him a company, a long-running problem and plenty more rows to fill.