A modern all-in-one platform designed to help veteran’s redeem the benefits and support they’ve earned.
R.E.D.E.E.M.
Founded and led by U.S. veterans, R.E.D.E.E.M. is a web app designed to bridge a gap in veteran support by helping them navigate the fragmented and often overwhelming landscape of VA benefits.
It serves as both a directory and a conduit, empowering veterans to efficiently redeem the benefits they’ve earned.
The Opportunity
Veterans transitioning back to civilian life often face one of their toughest challenges outside of active duty: figuring out what benefits they qualify for and how to claim them.
Veterans had to navigate a maze of government websites and piece together information on their own, leaving many feeling overwhelmed and underserved.
What they needed was one reliable place to access the benefits and support they’ve earned.
The Outcome
A web app that matches a veteran’s service record through their earned benefits, available resources, and how to take action.
Redeem makes the process for finding benefits easier and more accessible than ever before.
The Design Focus
The team from REDEEM insisted on a Veteran-led app development company to ensure empathy with the Veteran community.
We designed REDEEM to be clear and empowering—focusing on accessibility, familiarity, and function.
The UI follows WCAG 2.1 AA standards, featuring a dark mode for users with low vision, and patriotic visuals to create a sense of comfort and recognition for military users.
The Development Focus
AI played a key role in accelerating development and maintaining accuracy across the platform. AI agents were used to scrape, organize, and structure benefit data from official government websites across all 50 states at the state and federal levels. Then we used AI again to structure that content into data models that match a veteran’s service record to qualifying benefits.
We used the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Developer API with ID.me (what veteran’s use to access government sites) to securely log in a veteran through ID.me, allowing us to match their service records to benefits they qualify for—without storing a Veteran’s personal information.
To ensure the content is current and reliable, all benefit data is verified against VA.gov.
Getting To Work
We started by hosting workshop sessions to learn about the typical post-military journey, what challenges they face, and the goals for the Redeem platform.
From there, we conducted a heuristic analysis of government sites to find gaps and content patterns. These insights informed our design strategy and helped us identify opportunities to improve clarity and accessibility.
Because KRUTSCH is an SBA Certified Veteran-Owned Small Business, our personal veteran experiences directly informed the design of this app. Because of this, we know that veterans place their trust in official sources like VA.gov.
Guided by this knowledge, we designed a seamless sign-up experience that uses ID.me to securely verify service history and eligibility through VA.gov. Once verified, users instantly receive personalized benefit recommendations across the redeem categories like real estate, education, and entrepreneurship.
In addition, Redeem also offers masterclass videos that help veterans better understand and maximize each type of benefit.
The Result
The final product is a guided, intuitive experience that feels like having a personal VA navigator at your side.
Veterans can use Redeem to match with benefits based on their service history, access support from Veteran Service Officers or organizations, save or share benefits with others, and learn about their benefits from master classes led by subject matter experts.
Our app works well and was built quickly because it was created by people who know how to do it by hand. We’re not replacing designers and engineers with prompts, but leveraging AI to accelerate the design and dev process.
