OptiBP™, the mobile solution to democratizing blood pressure

In fragile settings like the informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya, access to routine blood pressure screenings and monitoring is often unavailable due to the cost of traditional blood pressure cuffs, patient access to clinics, and difficulty connecting blood pressure data to clinics remotely. OptiBP solves this problem by transforming the ubiquitous smartphone camera into a connected medical-grade blood pressure monitoring device.

Non-communicable diseases like hypertension account for more than a third of deaths in Kenya, with similar rates across sub-Saharan Africa. The leading cause of heart failure in sub-Saharan Africa is hypertension, while the diagnosis rate remains less than 40%.

In Kenya, approximately 60% of families live in areas defined as urban slums or informal settlements. Ethnographic research conducted on hypertension monitoring in these settlements revealed that they suffer from significantly limited access to clinics. Due to the shortage of clinical resources needed to measure blood pressure, monitoring patient blood pressure after initial diagnosis presents a serious challenge and has a significant impact on managing the disease. Especially in these low income, fragile settings, people lack access to necessary healthcare, while simultaneously, community health workers struggle with traditional clinical models to increase local capacity to treat chronic diseases like hypertension. They simply do not have the resources to follow up with patients out in the community and to capture and manage blood pressure data for effective diagnosis and treatment.

Hypertension is not only the number one chronic condition in Kenya. It is the number one chronic disease worldwide, affecting 1.3 billion adults – 30% of the adult population. Moreover, two-thirds of this population live in low-middle income countries. Hypertension poses a severe public health threat to life and longevity, increasing the risk of premature death by 2X and the risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease by 3x. 

Traditionally, the cuff method of measuring and tracking blood pressure has been woefully lacking. The cuff is often difficult to get in fragile settings and is bulky, inconvenient, and uncomfortable. It also doesn’t connect to patient record systems, requiring tedious manual data logging and analysis. As a result, tracking hypertension has been a critical failure point in effective management. OptiBP solves this two-fold problem by making the capture of blood pressure easy and convenient at the fingertip and then seamlessly connecting that information with clinicians for better treatment.

Hypertension screening and monitoring constitute a significant gap in fragile population health systems due to access and adherence to measurement protocols. Data collection and analysis are currently inefficient for health workers and their patients. Implementing the OptiBP solution in the Kibera settlement in Nairobi solves this problem of reliable access to hypertension monitoring and management by using smartphones that already exist in the hands of patients and community health workers.

Biospectal’s patented OptiBP software uses AI and machine learning to enable a transformation in access and actionability for capturing and managing blood pressure information. By turning smartphones into blood pressure monitoring devices, OptiBP contributes to building resilient health systems by dramatically increasing health worker effectiveness and capacity, and by engaging the ubiquity and connectivity of smartphones, amplifies access and quality of blood pressure monitoring and management among fragile communities. OptiBP provides an easy, effective tool for health workers and engages patients to take their own blood pressure via fingertip on their own phones. This decreases the burden on the health system and allows for effective anytime, anywhere monitoring without the need for direct health worker intervention.

OptiBP enables medical-grade blood pressure monitoring in existing smartphones by simply installing an app and placing a fingertip on the camera— without needing another wearable device or additional bulky hardware. The health workforce can repurpose their existing smartphones to measure blood pressure and ensure routine screenings are a regular part of primary care services. OptiBP integrates monitoring data with patient record systems and clinical management for clinical decision support.

By providing tools the community health workforce needs to screen and monitor population-level hypertension, governments, and health systems can make more effective and efficient interventions knowing the communities’ disease burden, while also enabling the continuity of care for chronic disease.

OptiBP also improves the accessibility and quality of health services to women and children by providing a tool to measure maternal hypertension. Hypertension diseases of pregnancy (HDP) are a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality. Blood pressure monitoring is an essential recommendation from WHO’s Digital Antenatal Care module for improving pregnancy outcomes in LMICs.

As part of our mission to develop scalable software solutions that improve hypertension management globally, we have forged a foundational partnership with Amref Health Africa, the largest health NGO in Africa, which will be the first initiative to be fully managed by the Biospectal team. This project extends our prior work with the WHO and is a model for strengthening fragile health systems across the world.

Amref Health Africa, Biospectal, and the Kenya Ministry of Health jointly propose to launch a mobile remote patient monitoring (MRPM) model for hypertension within Kenya's informal settlements, starting in Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa. MPRM increases local capacity and resilience in managing chronic disease and empowers community health workers to use technology to deliver primary care services better.

Biospectal's OptiBP platform is an ideal hypertension screening and management solution among fragile populations, where access to clinical facilities and using blood pressure cuffs are inconvenient and poses barriers to frequent measurement necessary for effective clinical treatment. Access to clinics is difficult; we democratize clinical monitoring at the "point of patient" in easy-to-use devices already in patient and health worker pockets everywhere. Smartphone blood pressure tracking is more cost-effective, more convenient, and quickly captures measurements to guide patients’ next steps in their own health management. Our platform connects data to governments and health systems to improve population-based health metric insights that inform interventions and primary care service investments.

Monitoring hypertension is crucial to antenatal care for positive pregnancy experiences and outcomes. OptiBP offers a solution that addresses barriers to diagnosis and treatment of high blood pressure during pregnancy, having immediate life-saving results. For underserved groups in fragile health settings around the world, OptiBP is an effective solution

Biospectal’s deeply experienced international team leverages diverse backgrounds across medical research and development, global health, and product innovation in the United States and Switzerland. The core team and board members include individuals with experience at Medtronic, the University of Global Health Equity, and several other organizations working among fragile health systems. We have built top-tier relationships with leaders in healthcare delivery, academic institutions, governments, and commercial partners to enable market access and impact, as well as research to support our mission.

Eliott Jones and Professor Patrick Schoettker, MD co-founded Biospectal and bring unique skills and experience to bear on medical research and development as well as extensive experience in business, product, and operations.

Eliott Jones CEO, is a Silicon Valley veteran with a deep history of leading innovation in digital transformation across a range of startups and large organizations, developing award-winning products leveraging emerging connected technologies, and implementing design-led digital product user experience.

Professor Patrick Schoettker,  Chief Medical Officer at Biospectal and the Head of the Department of Anesthesiology at the CHUV University Hospital (Lausanne, Switzerland). He is the inventor of various airway devices and holds multiple patents in airway management and wireless monitoring. He is the founding and acting president of the non-profit “Fondation Latine des Voies Aériennes (www.flava.ch),” which organizes annual challenging airway courses throughout Switzerland and financially supports airway-related research.

Andrea Maessani, Chief Technology Officer at Biospectal holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Before Biospectal, he co-founded and led from inception to acquisition a Swiss medical device startup called Intento, building medical devices and digital therapeutics solutions for stroke rehabilitation.

Dr. Fred St Goar, is a strategic advisor to Biospectal. A serial innovator in medical device development, global health leader, and Biospectal board member, he serves as the vice chairman of the board of the Fogarty Innovation, a Silicon Valley non-profit biotech incubator where the mission is to support globally impactful projects and women innovators. He teaches and is an innovation mentor, in the Stanford Biodesign program. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rwanda-based University of Global Health Equity. In 1999, he founded the company Evalve which developed the MitraClip, the leading percutaneous therapy for mitral regurgitation. He serves on Harvard Medical School’s Global Health Advisory Council. 

In addition to the core team, we have developed extended resource teams via partnerships in Tanzania, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Indonesia through the independent validation studies conducted by the WHO.

Biospectal has been conducting its ongoing OptiBP public beta program since 2021. Over 300 active users are testing the app, and the program will scale in the U.S. to several thousand in the next 6 months ahead of market entry. In addition to our large-scale public beta program, hundreds of patients have participated in clinical validation studies. Most recently, Digital Medicine in Nature published the results of a WHO-independent validation study conducted in Tanzania, South Africa, and Bangladesh. This study validated the performance of OptiBP over 300 patients across varying diverse settings and general and pregnant populations. In addition to accuracy, the study also explored other questions aimed at ensuring successful implementation in local settings and populations. For example, researchers found that skin tone had no effect on results. Such contextual relevancy research ensures that OptiBP will be feasible and effective in fragile and low-resource settings like Kibera.

We are applying to Solve to support expansion and to develop the capability for global impact in low-middle income countries (LMICs) and fragile communities. We are developing global health and health equity funding partnerships specifically to support our research in Kibera, Kenya in collaboration with the Kenya Ministry of Health as co-principal investigator and Amref. Support from MIT Solve will bolster our global impact mission by enabling the planning and execution of this study and will position us further as an innovation leader in a new era of remote healthcare delivery.

Specifically, Solve will support improved hypertension monitoring, personalized medicine, clinical decision support, and ultimately better health outcomes. We would access monitoring and evaluation support to build impact measurement practices across all of our new global health programs.

Finally, we would utilize the Solve network to gain strategic guidance, marketing recognition, and access to grant funding. Any funding received from this application would go directly to our mobile patient monitoring program setup and the operational costs for community health worker teams in Kibera.

Biospectal's patented OptiBP technology uses AI and machine learning to optically measure your blood pressure through the camera lens of a smartphone. OptiBP replaces the antiquated traditional blood pressure cuff while providing medical-grade blood pressure measurement and management anytime and anywhere with a device already in the hands of patients. In fragile health settings, wearable devices and even traditional blood pressure cuffs are not feasible to procure nor are they sustainable to maintain. In Kenya, with over 90% of the population owning a phone, the barrier to blood pressure monitoring would be completely eliminated. Hypertensive patients can now contribute to and be involved in their health outcomes in a way that hasn't existed. Without the innovation of OptiBP, hypertension would remain largely undiagnosed and poorly managed.

New devices, apps, and platforms allow patients to participate much more in their healthcare. The new distributed healthcare model fundamentally shifts from static to one where each patient is a stakeholder and a collaborator in their care. Active investment in an individual's health leads to better outcomes. This type of available technology helps the health workforce to better understand each patient's health and put together a road map to vitality by accumulating a volume of data unique to each patient. Health systems can view a patient's overall health not just once but over many years. The result is a comprehensive look at a patient's–and population’s health from a holistic perspective rather than the often-inaccurate snapshot from a single clinic or home visit. Ultimately, technology and platforms like OptiBP will allow patients to participate at the highest possible level in managing their health to a new degree and improving health outcomes.

1. Improve health outcomes – via improved user adherence and integration of connected data to clinicians.

We plan to integrate the OptiBP mobile application within electronic health record (EHR) systems used by healthcare providers and governments to enable data sharing between patients and clinicians. This will give clinicians real-time access to patient data, allowing them to make more informed decisions and provide better care, and help build a country profile of hypertension.

2. Reduce cost & Improve BP monitoring adherence – via ultra-scalable, efficient cloud distribution to the already existing global installed smartphone user base.

Providing OptiBP for community-driven solutions eliminates the need for providing blood pressure cuffs in fragile health systems. Eliminating the cost of the cuff takes responsibility off the patient and the health system and allows resources to be redirected toward strengthening the health system. OptiBP provides the same quality of a medical-grade blood pressure cuff with existing tools –smartphones–that are already in the hands of patients and clinicians. Therefore, this necessary technology is accessible to a wide range of users.

3. Create a global picture of hypertension – via epidemiological insights from unprecedented analysis of large-scale population data.

We plan to partner with existing organizations to implement a data analytics platform to analyze the data collected through the OptiBP application and provide clinicians and health systems with personalized insights and recommendations for patient care. This will improve the quality of patient care and further enhance health outcomes.

Finally, leveraging the large amounts of data collected through OptiBP can provide epidemiological data that is unprecedented and at a global scale. This will provide novel and highly useful insights into the prevalence of hypertension sought after by a variety of global health NGOs and major commercial organizations engaged in fighting hypertension in fragile communities. A worldwide data resource is instrumental to OptiBP’s long-term impact on achieving globally improved health outcomes.

1. Building clinical evidence

A large-scale, third-party clinical research study published in October 2020 by Scientific Reports in Nature validated the ability of the OptiBP smartphone app to measure blood pressure accurately utilizing transdermal optical sensing and a smartphone camera lens. Clinical study results published in the Blood Pressure Monitoring Journal in August 2021 confirm Biospectal OptiBP meets the ISO 81060-2 international protocol for accuracy for blood pressure measurement devices. No other blood pressure monitoring and management device on the market offers both the convenience of in-your-pocket, pure software functionality and medical-grade accuracy of OptiBP.

To pursue our vision of improving global hypertension management among fragile communities, we coordinated with the WHO to launch two independent blood pressure research and validation studies using OptiBP that specifically included prenatal female populations in 2021. The studies were completed in four low-resource countries (South Africa, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Indonesia) and focused on the routine measurement and monitoring of blood pressure, assessment of hypertension during pregnancy, and enabling global field testing. It also validated Biospectal's OptiBP smartphone app and data platform integration with the WHO's Digital Antenatal Care module, following WHO SMART guidelines and built on the WHO Open Smart Register Platform (OpenSRP).

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the first independent study was completed in three countries — South Africa, Tanzania, and Bangladesh — and concentrated on routine blood pressure measurement and monitoring and hypertension disorders during pregnancy. The second independent study dedicated to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy was completed in Indonesia and encompassed chronic hypertension, preeclampsia-eclampsia, preeclampsia superimposed on chronic hypertension and gestational hypertension. This study was conducted through the Summit Institute for Development (SID) in collaboration with Ona Kenya Limited. It was funded through Grand Challenges Canada's Saving Lives at Birth initiative, with additional backing from USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and the HRP Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction.

The findings of the first independent study were published in April 2023 in Digital Medicine in Nature.

Additional clinical research is ongoing. The Amref project in Kibera will be used to generate clinical research and validation, with the results being published to support the global good and inform general scientific community through publication of contextual learning around mobile and digital screening and diagnostics.

2. Regulatory approvals

Biospectal is currently in the process of securing regulatory approval – C.E. in Europe and FDA in the United States.

3. Go-to-market plans within these countries.

Our first global health go-to-market phase will be in low and middle-income countries. To do this, we will expand our partnerships in collaboration with governmental organizations and NGO research institutes to validate the product within the local environment and to build relationships that will ensure a successful product launch. We are actively building such relationships. Further financial support will boost the operationalization of planned initiatives. 

Problem Statement: Access to blood pressure screenings and monitoring is hard to access and/or unavailable in fragile health systems. The number of people affected by hypertension in low-middle-income countries continues to rise with no solution to the increasing burden of disease. 

Inputs: OptiBP technology, measuring blood pressure through the fingertip on a smartphone

Activities:

1. Biospectal conducts research and data collection projects around the world.

2. Biospectal collaborates with healthcare providers, governments, and other stakeholders to integrate the technology into healthcare systems and promote its use through local pilot programs.

3. Biospectal publishes our findings in peer-reviewed journals and public reports.

Outputs:

1. Large amounts of de-identified data to train the algorithm. 

2. Strong relationships with organizations on the ground that understand the local ecosystem.

3. Paints the picture of global hypertension with statistics to back it up. 

Short term outcomes:

1. Improved algorithm that reaches medical-grade accuracy and receives CE and FDA mark.

2. Early adoption and integration into the digital transformation of health systems based on cultural norms.

3. Increasing the effectiveness of diagnostic data capture and increasing patient engagement and contribution to diagnostics within disadvantaged communities

Long-term outcomes:

1. Improved public health outcomes due to increased access to medical-grade blood pressure measurement and management and increased patient engagement and involvement in their health outcomes

2. LMICs start to see a decrease in the number of total hypertensives and an increase in the management of the disease.

3. Better management of hypertension and other blood pressure-related conditions, leading to improved health outcomes for patients

Impact: Drive health equity around the globe by providing access to digital technologies that empower communities to improve their health outcomes while reducing costs.

Biospectal's patented OptiBP technology replaces the antiquated, uncomfortable, and inconvenient traditional blood pressure cuff.

OptiBP proprietary pulse wave analysis (PWA) algorithm transforms photoplethysmographic (PPG) wave information into blood pressure values by optically measuring blood flow through the skin. OptiBP technology is based on more than 10 years of R&D effort and was initially developed for the continuous monitoring of BP on anesthetized patients by means of optical sensors placed at the fingertip.

Figure 1: To use OptiBP, the user covers the smartphone camera with the fingertip after initiating a recording with the app.

OptiBP has been developed and ported into a mobile application on everyday smartphones (Figure 1). Our Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) utilizes the smartphone's camera to record the capillary blood flow beneath the fingertip's skin (Figure 2). The external visible light enhanced by camera flash illumination passes through the fingertip's skin. This light reflects off blood flowing through vessels in the finger. The volumetric variation of blood in the fingertip changes the light absorption, and the camera's RGB sensor registers such variation. The resulting image data changes based on the saturation increase and decrease as waves of blood pass through. The smartphone camera sensor then captures this reflected light and associated image variation. This technique creates what we call a photoplethysmographic (PPG) wave signal.

Figure 2: OptiBP utilizes image data generated from volumetric blood flow changes via light passing through the fingertip, reflecting off of blood flowing through the vessels, and then passing to the phone camera's image sensor.

Pulse wave analysis (PWA) is the study of the morphology of the pulse pressure waveform to obtain information about the state of ventricular ejection and the (elastic and geometric) properties of the arterial tree. When blood is being ejected from the heart, a blood pressure wave is generated and travels along the walls of the arterial tree (Figure 3). This pressure wave is partly reflected at each arterial bifurcation or discontinuity due to the mismatch of hydraulic impedance. These reflected waves travel back to the heart. The resulting aortic pressure waveform is thus a superposition of the forward wave traveling from the heart towards the periphery and a global reflected wave traveling back to the heart. One of the first and most marked reflections in the arterial pathway of the blood pressure wave traveling from the heart occurs at the aortic bifurcation, where the aorta forks into the left and right common iliac arteries. As such, the onset of the reflected wave marks the reflected wave transit time from the aortic valve to the aortic bifurcation and back. This time is proportional to the central pulse wave velocity (PWV), a well-established indicator of central blood pressure.

Figure 3: Pulse wave as observed at the radial/digital artery that created through the superimposition of several pressure waves. Two reflection sites, one at the height of the renal arteries, the other one in the vicinity of the iliac bifurcation, give rise to the reflected pulses (P2, P3) that trail the primary left ventricular ejection (P1).

OptiBP includes various processing steps to measure blood pressure (see Figure 4). The processing starts with the camera initialization and monitoring video quality during the recording, followed by the computation of a “raw” or uncalibrated blood pressure estimate based on the analysis of the recorded pulse wave PPG signal, and followed finally by the absolute blood pressure estimate that takes the raw blood pressure and adds an appropriate offset that is specific to the user. The OptiBP offset utilizes the periodic calibration to a blood pressure cuff and user demographics. 

Figure 4: Acquisition of optical signal via smartphone and subsequent processing into PPG values, PWA conversion to initial BP values and final adjustment to measure blood pressure.

Biospectal’s software-only approach enables the embodiment of the Biospectal OptiBP technology in a myriad of optical devices, starting with smartphone cameras that exist in pockets everywhere in the world.

OptiBP app doesn’t require a high-end smartphone; it works on phones of all price levels and uses the built-in camera to monitor, record and measure a user’s blood flow via their fingertip quickly and easily. A measurement is rendered in approximately 20 seconds — half the time of a typical blood pressure cuff. OptiBP’s proprietary algorithms and optical signal capture methods transform the captured data into blood pressure values. 

A large-scale, third-party clinical research study published in October 2020 by Scientific Reports in Nature validated the ability of the Biospectal OptiBP smartphone app to measure blood pressure accurately utilizing transdermal optical sensing and a smartphone camera lens. Clinical study results published in the Blood Pressure Monitoring Journal in August 2021 also confirm Biospectal OptiBP meets the ISO 81060-2 international protocol for accuracy for blood pressure measurement devices. 

No other blood pressure monitoring and measuring solution offers the comfort, ease of use, actionability, or medical-grade accuracy of OptiBP. Patients, families, and doctors all benefit from the ability to capture, track and share data to support better patient self-management and clinical treatment of hypertension. 

OptiBP 2023 Full Publication List 

1.    Accuracy of a smartphone application for blood pressure estimation in Bangladesh, South Africa, and Tanzania

Nature Digital Medicine, 2023

2.      Accuracy of blood pressure measurement across BMI categories using the OptiBP™ mobile application

Blood Pressure, 2022

3.      Evaluation of a novel optical smartphone blood pressure application: a method comparison study against invasive arterial blood pressure monitoring in intensive care unit patients.

BMC Anesthesiology, 2022

4. A novel smartphone app for blood pressure measurement: a proof-of-concept study against an arterial catheter.

Journal of Clinical Monitoring & Computing, 2022

5. Implanted System for Orthostatic Hypotension in Multiple-System Atrophy.

New England Journal of Medicine, 2022

6.      Evaluation of a new smartphone optical blood pressure application (OptiBP™) in the post-anesthesia care unit: a method comparison study against the non-invasive automatic oscillometric brachial cuff as the reference method.

Journal of Clinical Monitoring & Computing, 2022

7.      Evaluation of a novel mobile phone application for blood pressure monitoring: a proof of concept study.

Journal of Clinical Monitoring & Computing, 2021

8.      Smartphone based blood pressure measurement: accuracy of the OptiBP mobile application according to the AAMI/ESH/ISO universal validation protocol.

Blood Pressure Monitoring, 2021

9.      Blood pressure measurements with the OptiBP smartphone app validated against reference auscultatory measurements.

Nature Scientific Reports, 2020

10.   Machine Learning Approaches For Improved Continuous, Non-occlusive Arterial Pressure Monitoring Using Photoplethysmography.

IEEE, 2020

11.   Automated Pulse Oximeter Waveform Analysis to Track Changes in Blood Pressure During Anesthesia Induction: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Anesthesia & Analgesia, 2020

12.   Is your smartphone the future of physiologic monitoring?

Intensive Care Med, 2018

At Biospectal, as a multinational organization, we value creating an environment where employees feel comfortable, valued, and respected. Our diversity and inclusion efforts focus on embracing different cultures, genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. 

As we continue to grow, we will expand our diversity and inclusion initiatives quarterly with our executive leadership team to cultivate a collective community fostering learning and growth.

Biospectal’s business model is both direct to consumers through mobile app stores as well as through integration with healthcare delivery chain partners. Both pathways will be executed in LMICs and high-income markets to maximize the broadest patient access as well as integration into the clinical care regimen of the healthcare system. 

In LMICs, we will implement flexible licensing pricing at the country level to accommodate the local ability to pay. This flexibility is a key element of our agreement with the WHO and is essential to ensuring access and is built into our business plan. We expect that the pathway to market in LMICs will most commonly involve research institution partnerships (e.g., Amref, Kenyan Cardiac Society, African Population Health and Research Center), governments (Kenya Ministry of Health is a co-PI on our Kibera settlement study), and NGOs at earlier stages. As programs mature, we will extend the governmental organization and their partner (e.g., Medtronic, J&J, Safaricom) relationships to support our commercialization/sustainability strategy. The model of working with on-the-ground organizations helps to ensure successful adoption and commercial viability by understanding the local communities, their processes, operational opportunities and constraints, and other specific socio-cultural needs. And, by building relationships and local knowledge with governments and partner organizations, we will secure implementation viability in terms of funding and operational logistics.

Our long-term sustainability model relies on three main sources of funding:

1)  A combination of subsidized/reimbursement and licensing funding in low-resource settings. In LMICs and other fragile settings, we will work with large foundations and bilaterals to secure both transition to scale and sustaining funding opportunities. 

2) High-income setting revenue streams from direct-to-consumer subscription as well as business-to-business licensing to health industry-related partners (providers, payors, telehealth partners, wearable and IoT partners, etc.) to support market access in fragile and LMICs.

3) A unique collaboration was established with ENE, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission of driving health equity around the globe by providing access to technologies that empower communities to improve their health outcomes. The collaboration between the two organizations enables funding for health equity/global health related research opportunities that will expand the reach of Biospectal’s work of testing and implementing the OptiBP solution in underserved communities globally. Through this collaboration, ENE is provided access to Biospectal’s innovative technology for free and will provide the research outcomes that yield public good.

We previously have funded our global health initiatives via grants from Global Grand Challenges (Saving Lives @ Birth initiative – Funded by Gates Foundation, KOICA, NORAD, USAID, etc) and the Gates Foundation for research and validation in collaboration with the WHO. We are now working to fund programs outside of the WHO initiatives, which entails grant support to cover expenses in work for fragile populations. Our profit centers will be located primarily in high-income settings with lower dependency on low-resource settings.

We have raised USD ~10M from private investors (US/European), institutional (SeedLink Capital, Pathena Ventures, Privilege Ventures, Athensmed) and corporate (Labcorp) venture capital, and innovation grant funding (MassChallenge, Innosuisse) – as well as substantial in-kind contribution from global health research groups such as Ifikara (Tanzania) and Summit Institute for Development (Indonesia).