Invest in Neopenda
Arming health workers to be more productive with life-saving tech
Highlights
Featured Investor
“Prior to founding My village health, we have dedicated our careers to advancing medical solutions that serve patients where they are — not where we think they should be. As healthcare professionals of African origin who have global work experience and deep roots in Africa, we understand that scalable, sustainable healthcare solutions in Africa must be designed, scaled and delivered for the local context, with the local market uniqueness in mind. This is the ethos that drives our work at my vi...”
Our Team
Pitch
Neopenda is revolutionizing healthcare by ushering in a new era for vital signs monitoring. With neoGuard, we’re helping nurses and doctors gain powerful insights on patient health, to provide timely treatment before vitals decline and turn deadly.
Led by a powerhouse team of scientists and bioengineers from Columbia University, GSK, Medtronic, NYU, and Eli Lilly, Neopenda is developing novel vital signs monitoring technology that provides the data bedrock for saving lives.
Techstars, Fortune 500 Vodafone, Cisco, Wellcome Trust, Sorensen Impact, Hood Foundation, Jaza Rift, and a number of business angels already supported our mission with $6M+ in equity and grants, which has enabled us to develop our novel technology, secure patents, and obtain regulatory approval. After initially launching in Kenya 18 months ago, and growing our sales 124% in the last year, we’re now ready to hypercharge sales and expand across the $3.4B Sub-Saharan African market.
Every day, thousands of admitted hospital patients die from causes that are preventable and treatable.
Why?
Because nurses and doctors are understaffed and overworked, meaning they are spread too thin and unable to provide adequate, timely treatment.
In top US hospitals, the ratio of nurses to patients might be as low as 2-to-1, but in most places around the world, it is much, much higher; in some emerging markets, like India, Argentina, and South Africa, it’s 20-to-1, or even more!
And the negative impact from understaffing is HUGE. Recent studies show that if you increase the workload of a nurse by just one additional patient, there’s a 16% increase in the mortality rate for all patients.
Imagine being a nurse having to oversee a ward of 20 or more patients, all by yourself - an almost impossible task. Not only do you have very little time for each patient, but you’re in a noisy, hectic environment where it’s extremely difficult to notice if a patient is suffering.
Declining patient health can quickly turn critical, especially for young and vulnerable patients - and what might initially have been treatable, too often leads to a fatal outcome because treatment is administered too late.
This is why we invented neoGuard, a vital signs monitoring system purpose-built to help nurses and doctors prioritize treatment for those that need it most.
And our system is both intuitive and impactful:
Once a newborn is admitted to a hospital, the nurse assigns them one of our medical-grade wearable neoGuard devices. It continuously tracks 4 indicators that are crucial to patient health; pulse rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and temperature.
The neoGuard monitoring system aggregates data from across all devices and provides the nurse with an overview of vitals data from across all patients in their ward.
But we’re more than just a data aggregation platform: Using sounds and visual cues, neoGuard takes healthcare from reactive to proactive by alerting staff to a patient’s declining health before it becomes life-threatening. A built-in localization system provides a fast method for tracking down the sick patient.
System alerts are purposefully designed to cut through the noise of a bustling hospital ward and immediately bring attention to any sick patient. In healthcare, timing is everything, and the additional minutes gained from receiving alerts, can often be the deciding factor between life and death.
We want to revolutionize vital signs monitoring, starting with infant care in emerging markets.
neoGuard looks different for a reason: We started from scratch, building a solution that is purposefully designed to match the needs of health workers in these markets.
We spent years on the ground across dozens of hospitals, learning how more than 1,000 clinicians do their work, in order to craft a product that fits exactly their needs.
Hospitals in Kenya, our beachhead market, face frequent power outages, unsanitary conditions, and overcrowding that makes traditional bulky, fragile patient monitors both impractical and unaffordable.
18 months ago, product sales went live and momentum has been spectacular.
30+ different hospitals in Kenya have already bought neoGuard. With our land-and-expand sales strategy, where hospitals buy an initial batch of 5-10 neoGuards to test before committing to larger orders, we’re projecting a 27x growth potential per hospital.
Forward-looking projections are not guaranteed.
These 30+ hospitals alone carry $175K in potential annual sales (assuming devices are replaced every 5 years) once we expand outside neonatal to support all age groups.
We’re also laser-focused on increasing our gross margins.
Forward-looking projections are not guaranteed.
We’re working on bringing production closer to the African market, which allows us to reduce manufacturing costs and lower our climatic impact. Starting with packaging, we plan to fully relocate final assembly to Kenya by 2026, which we project will significantly expand our gross margins from c. 40% today to c. 70%.
Building on years of validation studies, neoGuard is fully compliant for regulated clinical settings, such as hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices. And our solution has already been used to monitor 2,000+ patients for more than 35,000 hours - a number we expect to grow exponentially as we expand the 330 units of neoGuard currently in circulation.
WHO, UNITAID, and the UN have recognized the innovative potential of neoGuard as a product and Neopenda as a company - a testament to our commitment, innovation, and vision.
Neopenda's team is a dynamic powerhouse of skilled, bioengineering minds with diverse backgrounds from Columbia University, Eli Lilly, Medtronic, New York University, and GlaxoSmithKline.
With more than a decade of experience working in highly regulated industries, combined with thousands of hours spent, on the ground working in low-resource settings, our team bridges the gap between innovative solutions and patient-centered healthcare.
The total addressable market (TAM) for vital signs monitoring in Sub-Saharan Africa exceeds $3.4B and is growing 5% per year. Today neoGuard serves the 30M neonatal patients admitted yearly to a hospital. With small modifications, our product can cover all ages of patients from babies to adults, and spot-check monitoring at the doctor’s office and at home (via the neoSpot app).
We’re currently expanding aggressively in Kenya, and in the coming years we plan to target Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, and Tanzania. In time, our aim is to cover the entire Sub-Saharan African region, which consists of 49 countries - many of which have vibrant economies. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to expand significantly in the coming decades, primarily from rapid population growth, from 1.3B today to a projected 2B people by 2050.
We’ve got big plans for how the data we’re collecting today will help clients improve the efficiency of clinics tomorrow.
neoCloud (projected release 2026) not only aggregates data from across all our systems, but supports clinics and hospitals in optimizing the efficiency of their practices. Today, knowledge sharing between clinics is sporadic and often based on gut feel, but neoCloud will give health workers hard data to systematically improve their operations.
With neoGuard, neoSpot, and neoCloud, we’re on track to build a platform for a future where healthcare is data-driven, interconnected, and constantly improving. neoCloud will introduce a subscription-based model, where customers can pay to unlock powerful modules like dashboards, reports, and benchmarks, and we project that by 2030 subscriptions will constitute 27% of our revenue.
All these innovations and product-releases propel our business forward towards 2030.
This year, we are expanding beyond neonatal health to support vital signs monitoring of all ages. We plan to release neoSpot next year and neoCloud by 2026, which will take our solution outside of hospitals and add a recurring revenue model to our business. Market expansion includes Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa and Ghana and Nigeria in West Africa before expanding broadly across the continent.
Wearable health trackers are booming, both in wellness (Oura) and in the clinical space (Ceribell). We see several opportunities for generating shareholder return.
Kiddo Health, which is focused on at-home monitoring for preschoolers, proves VCs investing in our space do so at high multiples. IPOs for medical companies Kestra (ticker :KMTS) and Ceribell (:CBLL) demonstrate a viable pathway towards an exit. We are committed to delivering returns for our investors and see several opportunities for generating attractive returns.
We’re raising our community round because we want to give everyone the opportunity to invest in making life-saving vital signs monitoring convenient and accessible to all - where you live shouldn’t determine whether you live.
Your investment will help us expand our impact and bring our product to the millions that need it most. With market expansion, continued product innovation, and additional revenue models ahead of us, we’re only just getting started, and are excited for you to share in the value as we grow!
