Our story begins more than a decade ago with our founder & CEO, Dr. Danielle Varda. After spending three years as a policy scientist at the RAND Corporation, Dr. Varda spent the last 11 years at the University of Colorado Denver as a tenured professor in the School of Public Affairs, researching the impacts of social networks on health and well-being outcomes. She built a team and founded the Center on Network Science. The team built and scaled an organizational network analysis survey tool called  PARTNER. It has since been used by over 5,500 customers across 40 countries and all 50 states.  But the team was just getting started.

Dr. Varda started to further explore ways to scale PARTNER to reach more people and make a bigger impact. Driven by a mission to build capacity for transformative and collaborative innovation, she decided to launch a social enterprise to best reach these goals. Following her participation in the Boomtown Accelerator program in Boulder, Colorado, Dr. Varda founded Visible Network Labs on March 16, 2018.

With significant momentum from PARTNER, the Network Leadership Training Academy, and strong partnerships with dozens of social change agents around the country, Visible Network Labs continued to innovate around tools, training and services. We crystalized our PARTNER Method, a five-step process for creating, tracking, and adapting strategies to drive network impact. We created a new tool, PARTNERme, to facilitate personal-level network analysis in healthcare and clinical settings to improve health and well-being. In the Fall of 2020, we took first place at the Prime Health Innovation Challenge.