The Africa Health Ventures Podcast

From a university in South Africa to the shelves of Walgreens in the United States, the South African tech company HearX [https://hearxgroup.com/] has risen to be a global industry leader in hearing health and announced a $100M capital raise earlier this year. In this episode, Rowena Luk sits down with CEO Nic Klopper [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nic-klopper-24824877/] and CSO Seline van der Wat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/seline-van-der-wat/] to unpack how HearX (now LXE Hearing [https://lxehearing.com/]) is shaking up a 100-year-old industry to lower costs and improve access to care around the world. Tune in for a story of grit, timing, and bold bets that paid off. In This Episode * (2m48s) How HearX evolved from a research project at the University of Pretoria to a high-growth startup * (4m34s) Crisis of faith: can we do more than just send children into a broken healthcare system? * (8m13s) Landing the partnership with Bose, the global industry leader in consumer audio * (11m20s) Breakthrough: expanding our reach from South Africa to the world * (16m08s) “We went up against the industry giants, larger bank accounts, big law firms… and we won.” * (19m32s) The year we almost didn’t make it * (22m47s) Rapid-fire questions and advice for founders Connect with Africa Health Ventures Africa Health Ventures [https://africahealthventures.com/] invests in healthcare innovations that will dramatically improve access and quality of healthcare in Africa and around the world. 👍 Share your reaction [https://www.linkedin.com/company/africahealthventures/] to this podcast on LinkedIn 📰 Sign up [http://rowenaluk.substack.com/] for our newsletter to stay informed about deals, events, and opportunities about healthcare ventures in Africa 🎙️ Subscribe [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaJ5L0UBW2ZMZME9574Gm] to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts 🪙 Nominate [https://africahealthventures.com/] an African startup for seed funding 🤝🏻 Invest [https://africahealthventures.com/invest/] with us Show Notes * Nic Klopper [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nic-klopper-24824877/] is CEO at LXE Hearing (previously HearX & Lexie Hearing). His experience ranges from being an avid start-up investor to founding 7 successful businesses and exiting 3 of them to date. As the co-founder and CEO of HearX Group and Lexie Hearing, Nic has been the driving force behind a transformative shift in the hearing health industry. He has guided the company from early-stage healthtech startup to a multimillion-dollar enterprise with products now available in 38 countries. * Seline van der Wat [https://www.linkedin.com/in/seline-van-der-wat/] is the Chief Strategy Officer at LXE Hearing (previously hearX & Lexie Hearing). Under her leadership, the company was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Companies in the World [https://time.com/collection/time100-companies-2023/6285111/lexie-hearing/] list in 2023, for hearX’s groundbreaking work in hearing health accessibility. Seline has transformed companies into first-to-market and best-in-market giants through her strategic and organizational development expertise. * Vula Mobile [https://www.vulamedical.com/], founded by Dr. William Mapham [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-william-mapham-78ab248/], was an early collaborator with HearX. In 2018 with support from the Google Impact Challenge [https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/southafrica2018/charities], Vula Mobile and HearX partnered to screen children in Gauteng for vision and hearing. This led to the epiphany at HearX that they needed to do more than just screen for hearing loss; they needed to play a direct role in increasing access to hearing aids. * Seline’s shoutout goes to Ilara Health [https://www.ilarahealth.com/] and its CEO Emilian Poppa [https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilianpopa/] for Ilara’s work to improve financing and access to diagnostics at scale for clinics across Kenya. * Seline’s second shoutout goes to Jonathan Berkowitz [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhberkowitz/] at MotionsAds [https://www.motionads.co.za/], which provides additional income to drivers in the gig economy (like Uber Eats) through advertising. Get full access to Africa Health Ventures at rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe [https://rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Today we tackle head-on the myths and misconceptions of investing in Africa. We invite two of the leading venture capitalists in Africa to field tough questions from a room full of experienced international investors. Our guests are Bongani Sithole, CEO of 54 Collective and the most active investor in Africa, and Lelemba Phiri, Founding Partner of ATG Samata, a leading African gender lens investor. This conversation was recorded live in November of 2024 at a Toniic gathering in Cape Town, South Africa. Toniic [https://toniic.com/] is a global community of individual, family office, and foundation asset owners seeking deeper impact with their investments and their lives. In This Episode * (2m46s) What is the Africa opportunity? * (8m19s) Myth: “Africa is a single market.” What does it mean to invest across 54 countries? * (13m28s) Myth: “There are no exits in Africa.” How do investors make a profit from putting capital into African businesses? * (18m57s) Myth: “Political instability makes it impossible to invest in Africa.” What trade agreements, regulatory environment, and political context enable private investments to succeed in Africa? * (22m15s) Myth: “There is a shortage of talent in Africa.” Where can investors find world-class founders? * (28m43s) How can you get started investing in Africa? * (30m12s) Recap Connect with Africa Health Ventures Africa Health Ventures [https://africahealthventures.com/] invests in healthcare innovations that will dramatically improve access and quality of healthcare in Africa and around the world. 👍 Share your reaction [https://www.linkedin.com/company/africahealthventures/] to this podcast on LinkedIn 📰 Sign up [http://rowenaluk.substack.com/] for our newsletter to stay informed about deals, events, and opportunities about healthcare ventures in Africa 🎙️ Subscribe [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaJ5L0UBW2ZMZME9574Gm] to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts 🪙 Nominate [https://africahealthventures.com/] an African startup for seed funding 🤝🏻 Invest [https://africahealthventures.com/invest/] with us Show Notes About Bongani Sithole [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bongani-sithole-7112527/] and 54 Collective [https://54collective.vc/] As Chief Executive Officer of 54 Collective, Bongani Sithole is a tech-entrepreneur who over the last 18 years has built 3 technology businesses from the ground up. Before joining 54 Collective, Bongani’s last company — Black Beard — built tech businesses on behalf of corporates. As CEO, Bongani leads the early-stage investor as it seeks to invest in, collaborate, and support founders to go beyond borders and make a discernible impact through commercially-orientated innovations that can sustainably improve the lives of the continent’s people. 54 Collective is Africa’s most active, hands-on, early stage venture capital investor. About Lelemba Phiri [https://lelemba.com/] and ATG Samata [https://atgsamata.com/] Lelemba is a Co-founder and Partner at ATG Samata, a gender-lens venture capital firm that is focused on investing in women-led businesses and gender diverse teams in key markets in Southern, East and West Africa. She is a seasoned development finance expert with 18+ years of experience working in both public and private sector, across 10 markets+. This includes having been a key part of scaling a Fintech start-up from one market to five before moving from entrepreneurship into venture capital. She is an expert in gender-lens investing, innovative finance, and entrepreneurship development with a key focus on advancing women. About Christophe de Montille [https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophedemontille/?originalSubdomain=ke] and Beyond Capital Ventures [https://www.beyondcapitalventures.com/] Christophe de Montille is a Principal at Beyond Capital Ventures, a multi-asset firm investing in Seed to Series A companies across India and Africa in need-to-have sectors such as financial services, healthcare and climate. Prior to joining Beyond Capital, Christophe worked for a decade as a management consultant leading large tech transformations for corporate and federal clients. In addition to his work at Beyond Capital, Christophe led transaction advisory work for over 30 deals in the Global South and mobilizing over $54M in capital. About Toniic [https://toniic.com/] Toniic is a global community of private asset owners seeking to steward wealth and use influence to enable a thriving world. Its members — individuals, family offices and foundations from more than 25 countries — are active impact investors and philanthropists, for whom Toniic provides education, investment opportunities, impact support, events, and community. Toniic also seeks to build the field of deep impact investing, moving money and mindsets and leading by example. Get full access to Africa Health Ventures at rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe [https://rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

InstaDeep [https://www.instadeep.com/] was the largest acquisition on the African continent last year, sold for half a billion euro to the pharmaceutical company BioNTech [https://www.biontech.com/]. We speak today with Karim Beguir [https://www.linkedin.com/in/karim-beguir-2350161/], InstaDeep’s Founder and CEO. This is a healthcare success story at a time when the vast majority of investments in Africa are in fintech. It's also a deeptech victory at a time when most of the world is skeptical about whether deeptech can even be built, let alone scaled, in Africa. So how did a math geek from Tunisia bootstrap a company that captured the hearts and minds of a continent? Tune in [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaJ5L0UBW2ZMZME9574Gm] to find out. Connect with Africa Health Ventures 📰 Sign up [http://rowenaluk.substack.com/] for our newsletter to stay informed about deals, events, and opportunities about healthcare ventures in Africa 🎙️ Subscribe [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaJ5L0UBW2ZMZME9574Gm] to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts 👍 Follow [https://www.linkedin.com/company/africahealthventures/] us on LinkedIn 🪙 Nominate [https://africahealthventures.com/] an African startup for seed funding 🤝🏻 Invest [https://africahealthventures.com/invest/] with us In This Episode * (3m16s) Start with passion. Passion will carry you through the years when you don’t know whether it’s going to work out or not. Passion will draw others to back you and keep on backing you, even when times are tough. * (6m18s) Engineering exits is a delicate balancing act between short and long-term goals. * (7m19s) How to navigate the hard balance between short-term profitability and long-term ambition? It took InstaDeep 5 years to build DeepPCB, which is now the best in the world in its product class. * (9m08s) Deliver 10X value in your partnerships. This will harden the relationships that lead to clients, to investors, and to exits. * (10m47s) How do we build investable talent in Africa? The journey to unlock African talent begins with the founder. Make yourself a world-class expert; pursue your vision with passion; and create the environment to grow and attract industry-leading talent. * (15m04s) AI, biotech, and the future: we are today with Biology AI where LLMs were in 2020. The golden age of biology AI and biotech is just beginning. African founders have an unparalleled opportunity to build the data assets of the future. * (18m15s) Do not limit yourself. Many African founders suffer from a failure of ambition. Think global from day one. Show Notes * InstaDeep: The Early Days [https://restofworld.org/2024/instadeep-africa-ai-startup-acquisition/]: this article from Rest of World covers some of the early ventures and misadventures of Karim Beguir * Born in Tatouine [https://endeavor.org/stories/instadeep-story/]: from a remote city in Tunisia, how Karim rose to the global stage * Google’s 2014 acquisition of DeepMind [https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/] was an early inspiration to Karim in founding InstaDeep * BioNTech announced its acquisition of InstaDeep [https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/10/biontech-acquires-tunisian-born-and-u-k-based-ai-startup-instadeep-for-562m/] in 2023 * Nucleotide Transformer [http://Nucleotide Transformer] is InstaDeep’s industry-leading genomics Language Models. In 2023 they released these models open-source [https://www.instadeep.com/2023/07/instadeep-open-sources-the-nucleotide-transformers-its-collection-of-genomics-language-models-to-huggingface/] to HuggingFace [https://huggingface.co/] Get full access to Africa Health Ventures at rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe [https://rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

In our fourth and final episode of the AI for Health Series, we take a peek under the hood of the maternal health chatbot supporting pregnant woman delivering in public health facilities across South Africa. To begin, Debbie Rogers [https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-rogers-62399827/], CEO of Reach Digital Health [https://www.reachdigitalhealth.org/], shares her personal take on the origin story of MomConnect [https://www.kznhealth.gov.za/momconnect.htm], South Africa’s maternal health chatbot. Sid Ravinutala [https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharth-ravinutala-8640427/] of IDInsight [https://idinsight.org/] then takes us on a tour of how AI will change chatbots, governments, science, music, and health. Along the way, Sid and Debbie share a number of specific tools, tips, and trends relevant for AI practitioners everywhere.  Listen now [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaJ5L0UBW2ZMZME9574Gm] wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, etc.). This is the fourth and final episode of our series on AI for Health. Thank you to our sponsor, Reach Digital Health [https://www.reachdigitalhealth.org/], for making this series possible. Connect with Africa Health Ventures 📰 Sign up [http://rowenaluk.substack.com] for our newsletter to stay informed about deals, news, events, and opportunities related to healthcare ventures in Africa 👍 Follow [https://www.linkedin.com/company/africahealthventures/] us on LinkedIn 🎙️ Subscribe [https://link.chtbl.com/africahealthventures] to this podcast to get notified when new episodes air 🪙 Nominate [https://africahealthventures.com] an African startup for seed funding 🤝🏻 Invest [https://form.jotform.com/232193325039554] with us Show Notes In this interview, we cover: * (2m56s) - An introduction to MomConnect, South Africa’s maternal health chatbot. * (9m30s) - What is the future of MomConnect? Debbie looks ahead to how AI will allow chatbots to address the specific and personal needs of mothers across South Africa. This hyper-personalization will unlock behaviour change and precision health at scale. * (13m53s) - IDInsight has supported MomConnect to better understand what mothers need when they interact with MomConnect and guide them to the right information. They are using AI to infer meaning from words i.e. intent classification. * (17m07s) - Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will allow the average citizen to better understand and tap into government programs and benefits. Sid cites the example of Indus Action’s work in this space in India. * (20m12s) - AIs are now pretty good at making music. We share a clip from a song generated by AI. * (22m07s) - Sid anticipates how AI will usher in a new era of qualitative science. * (25m00s) - “Every AI Application in the Social Sector Should Have Guardrails". See below for links to specific guardrail tools recommended by Sid. * (27m40s) - Sid unpacks the role of regulation to manage the risks of AI. He discusses the balance between regulation and acceptable risk. * (32m18s) - Sid shares a set of technical tools and resources for getting started with AI. Also linked below. * (32m58s) - A few shoutouts to other organizations doing interesting work in this space. * (33m49s) - The next 10 years according to Sid and Debbie. Tools and References * NeMo Guardrails [https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/guardrails/introduction.html] and Guardrails [https://www.guardrailsai.com/docs#:~:text=Guardrails%20is%20a%20Python%20framework,risks%2C%20check%20out%20Guardrails%20Hub.]: Sid recommends that every AI application in the social sector should be using guardrails. Here are two open-source toolkits that programmers can add to their applications to implement such guardrails. * To get started quickly with AI applications, Sid recommends a suite of tools: * LangChain [https://www.langchain.com/] is a programming framework to make it easy to build LLM tools. * Llama Hub [https://llamahub.ai/] is a centralized repository and platform for integrating various tools and plugins specifically designed to enhance the functionality and performance of the LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) series of models. * LammaIndex [https://www.llamaindex.ai/] is a toolset designed for indexing, querying, and managing data to improve the efficiency and accuracy of search and retrieval operations in large-scale language models. * Suno AI [https://suno.com/] is the tool Sid used to generate his song on AI for good. It’s pretty good. * Reach Digital Health [https://www.reachdigitalhealth.org/] is a South African nonprofit that scales digital health programmes to improve delivery of healthcare services. * IDInsight [https://www.idinsight.org/] helps leaders combat poverty worldwide by designing, deploying and promoting evidence-generating tools, including data science and artificial intelligence. * Indus Action [https://www.indusaction.org/] is an organization working with IDInsight to make government services more accessible and understandable to the average citizen with the use of AI. * Sid’s first shoutout goes to Jugalbandi [https://www.jugalbandi.ai/], an open platform [https://github.com/OpenNyAI/Jugalbandi-Manager] that integrates Generative AI and Indian language translation models to create conversational AI solutions. It supports over 50 Indian languages and aims to democratize access to information in various sectors such as government services, law, and healthcare through chatbots on platforms like WhatsApp. Jugalbandi is a part of the Bashini mission of the government of India. * Jacaranda Health [https://jacarandahealth.org/]: Sid gives a shoutout to Jacaranda Health for building a language model for Swahili [https://jacarandahealth.org/jacaranda-launches-first-in-kind-swahili-large-language-model/] in Kenya and releasing it open source. They also provide a maternal messaging service in Kenya called PROMPTS [https://jacarandahealth.org/prompts/]. * Dimagi [https://dimagi.com/]: Sid also gives a shoutout to Dimagi for developing an open-source platform called Open Chat Studio [https://sites.dimagi.com/open-chat-studio/equity-inclusion-ai] to rapidly deploy LLM-based solutions for global health. Thank you for tuning in to Africa Health Ventures. This podcast is public so please share it with the world. Get full access to Africa Health Ventures at rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe [https://rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

There's a lot of hype about what generative AI and LLMs like ChatGPT will do to improve healthcare in Africa and around the world - but is it going to work? Today we sit down with the team running the largest study ever done on how LLMs will - and won't - work for healthcare in Africa. Tobi Olatunji [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobi-olatunji-md/], Founder and CEO of Intron Health [https://www.intron.io/], speaks with Bilal Mateen [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilal-a-mateen-0bb88254/?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2F&originalSubdomain=uk], Executive Director of Digital Square at PATH [https://digitalsquare.org/], to discuss the upcoming AfriMed-QA project which will evaluate 20 LLMs over 32 clinical specialties across 15 countries in Africa.  This is Part 3 of 4 of our series on AI for Health. Shoutout to our sponsor, Reach Digital Health [https://www.reachdigitalhealth.org/], for making this series possible. Show Notes * (4m02s) - Introducing Bilal Mateen and Tobi Olatunji * (9m20s) - The 4 Ways Generative AI Will Change Healthcare in Africa * (17m01s) - The AfriMed-QA Project will create a dataset of 20,000 medical questions and answers from 15 countries across Africa and 32 clinical specialties. In the second phase, the Project will benchmark 20 of the leading large language models (LLMs) in the world to evalutae their effectiveness in the context of Africa healthcare. * (30m02s) - Takeaways from our guest speakers for anyone working in global health and looking to apply AI * (32m46s) - A call to action for the community of global health donors Note the content in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment, legal, business, tax, or medical advice. Nor should this information be used to evaluate any investment or security. Get full access to Africa Health Ventures at rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe [https://rowenaluk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]