Natalie Egan was already in an emotionally raw place when an altercation forever changed the course of her life.

Her marriage had recently fallen apart and she had just gotten fired by the CEO she had put in charge of running the company she founded, PeopleLinx, when she came out as transgender. Only a few weeks after her transition Egan was in line at a Starbucks when someone she had tried to make small talk with whispered, according to Egan, “something very nasty” under their breath. When Egan asked the woman to repeat herself she turned to her and said, rather aggressively, “you heard me.”

“That may not sound like a big deal, but for me it was really traumatic,” Egan says. “As they walked out I remember thinking to myself, ‘if they only knew my story; if they only knew what I had been through and what I have done to try and fit in for the last forty years, and how I’ve hurt other people trying to fit in—if they knew all of that they wouldn’t judge me that way.’ That was the ‘ah-ha’ moment.”

After that altercation, in the fall of 2015, Egan set out to create software that could facilitate empathy at scale. Today her company Translator LLC offers diversity and inclusion training tools that provide perspective, as well as a safe space to have difficult conversations. The programming is not unlike typical diversity and inclusion exercises with the added advantage of anonymity, allowing participants to ask questions and interact more freely.

Measuring (and increasing) return on investment

Digitizing what has historically been a very analog process not only enables remote participation, but also provides a layer of data to facilitators based on anonymous surveys and questionnaires. As a result companies can now measure the effectiveness of their diversity and inclusion programs, and target interventions based on employee sentiment.

“Almost 90% of the Fortune 500 companies that we’re talking to, there’s people inside the company that are literally flying around the world to different offices and facilitating 90-minute conversations on microaggressions, or unconscious bias, and they have nothing to show for it,” says Egan. “Now after the meeting we can say ‘here’s the data,’ and that’s revolutionary for our clients.”

Such clients include Fortune 500 companies like NBCUniversal and cloud-based human capital management software provider Ultimate Software.