MARIA NEWMAN O'NEAL.
Maria Newman O'Neal · Technology, care & access · Los Angeles

Who gets seen, resourced, and cared for?

I'm a technologist and therapist-in-training working at the intersection of technology, care, and access. Over the past decade I worked at companies like Microsoft and Shopify, and was founding director of product at CHANI, a cult-favorite mindfulness app that reached the top of the App Store. Now I design, research, and build around one theme: who our systems make visible and resourced, who they leave out, and how people make do without the support they need. I'm currently building Funding Findr, training as a marriage and family therapist, and studying the toll society's abdication takes on caregivers.

The work
One through-line: the people institutions overlook, from small nonprofits to invisible caregivers, and the technology that could make those systems legible to them.
01 · Building tech
Funding Findr
Who gets funded is a question of power. Philanthropy is opaque and relationship-driven, hardest to navigate for the small, community-rooted organizations that need it most. Funding Findr makes that landscape legible and searchable, redistributing access to the resources that let mission-driven work happen. It's my strongest evidence of taking a project from idea to market.
Co-founder · access & information infrastructure
02 · Facilitating healing
Marriage & family therapist in training
I'm training as a marriage and family therapist, sitting with people through illness, aging, caregiving, and grief. It's where I see up close what access to care really looks like, and who it leaves behind. It grounds everything I build.
Clinical training · the human side of access
03 · Researching caregivers
The CORD framework
CORD (Caregiving Oxytocin Reciprocity Disruption) is my research framework on how unpaid care extracts from the people who give it: the biobehavioral toll our systems tend to hide, and what it would mean to design for it instead. I present it at the National Council on Family Relations in November 2026.
Framework · presenting at NCFR, Nov 2026
Questions that guide me
The questions underneath the work: what I keep coming back to.
Q1
Who do our systems make visible, and who do they leave out?
Technology decides who is seen, counted, funded, and cared for. I'm interested in who falls through: the small org without a grant writer, the caregiver with no one to navigate the system for them.
Q2
What would technology look like if it were designed around care, not extraction?
Most platforms are built to capture attention and value. I want to build the opposite: tools whose success is measured by how much they give back.
Q3
How do we make opaque institutions legible to the people they're meant to serve?
Philanthropy, eldercare, public benefits: these are navigable mostly by those who can afford expertise. I want technology that closes that gap, not widens it.