Innovative Healthtech Startup, Ubenwa Secures $2.5 Million
Ubenwa, a cutting-edge healthtech firm that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify newborns between the ages of 0 and 6 months, has secured $2.5 million in pre-seed capital to scale its operations and realize its go-to-market plan.
Charles Onu, a Nigerian with experience in the medical industry and a significant amount of AI practice, created the Montreal-based firm in 2017. This was the beginning of Charles’ concept for Ubenwa.
Ubenwa is leading the way in automated sound-based baby diagnostics by combining cutting-edge AI with years of academic study.
Although Ubenwa is a separate firm, research by Onu’s team has been going on there since 2017 in Mila, a well-known AI cluster in Quebec, Canada.
However, Ubenwa’s influence is being noticed outside of Canada as well. Ubenwa boasts of having the biggest and most varied database of clinically annotated infant cry sounds because to strategic alliances with top institutions in Nigeria, Brazil, and Canada.
Onu, who is also the CEO of Ubenwa, said in a statement to TechCabal that Ubenwa’s solution helps separate an infant’s natural screams from the cries for help that are brought on by disease.
He explained that Ubenwa was developing a diagnostic instrument that could determine whether a baby was genuinely crying out for help. “Our ultimate goal is to be a translator for baby cry sounds, giving a non-invasive technique to monitor medical problems wherever you find a baby: delivery rooms, neonatal and paediatric intensive care units, nurseries, and even homes,” the researchers write.
According to the press release, Ubenwa has created algorithms to monitor infant cry activity, find acoustic biomarkers, and forecast irregularities, turning the sounds of babies crying into potential diagnoses. Ubenwa’s program demonstrated a 40% improvement over APGAR scoring, the generally accepted physical evaluation at delivery, in a successful pilot study to identify neurological damage caused by birth hypoxia.
Dr. Guilherme Sant’Anna, a professor at McGill University and a neonatologist at Montreal Children’s Hospital, praised Ubenwa’s approaches further and indicated her organization’s desire to work with UIbenwa.
She said in the news release that “cry analysis has the potential to provide vital information for detecting infants with growing brain abnormalities.” This kind of non-invasive diagnostic tool would be a valuable clinical asset for pediatric care. We are ecstatic to work with Ubenwa, and we realize this through carefully monitored clinical tests.
Radical Ventures led the $2.5 million pre-seed round for Ubenwa, which also included returning investor AIX Ventures, businessmen Richard Socher and Pieter Abbeel, Turing Award recipient Yoshua Bengio, Canadian politician Marc Bellemare, and Hugo Larochelle from Google Brain.
Sanjana Basu, an investor from Radical Ventures, will become a member of the Ubenwa board as a result of the fundraising relationship. Basu expressed confidence in the investment in Ubenwa and insisted that the demand for digital goods, such as the mobile app and API offered by Ubenwa, is still rising.
According to Basu, “Ubenwa has produced a proprietary innovation for an underserved and significant market, supported by a good clinical base.” In the consumer and clinical pediatrics markets, where demand for improved digital products is constantly rising, deciphering a baby’s cry using machine learning can open up a variety of possibilities.
Parents and hospitals can currently sign up on Ubenwa’s platform to become early users of the app. According to Onu, this in-house testing will assist the business in gathering thorough use-case information that will be used to improve Ubenwa’s infant cry-diagnosing software suite.
