Wella Health CEO Selected for $100,000 PandemicTech Innovation Fellowship
The CEO and Founder of Wella Health, Ikpeme Neto, has been selected into PandemicTech Innovation Fellowship for 2020.
The fellowship will support Neto and his company’s work in creating epidemiological data collection and visualization tools that support Nigeria’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Proud to be a PandemicTech innovation fellow and work with awesome mentors and colleagues to improve our work using tech to help the COVID-19 response in Nigeria. https://t.co/Af0oMmkDEq
— Ikpeme Neto (@docneto)
The PandemicTech Innovation Fellowship 2020 is a US $100,000 initiative to identify and support the most promising global health security innovators leading the fight against threat of pandemics and infectious diseases.
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the PandemicTech community made special consideration to locally-driven innovative approaches to confronting the pandemic.
PandemicTech 2020 Fellows
Wella Health CEO is among the Four innovators already selected for this years fellowship. Neto was selected following a successful Fellowship Project Proposal and the consequent virtual interview with members of the PandemicTech team.
The fellowship will support Driage, a solution by Wella Health which provides COVID-19 guidance to users based on NCDC guidelines. The solution also serves as a frontline health equipment and resource inventory to health practitioners.
The platform also has Caselinks, a solution that shows a frontline impression of what is available in hospitals. This allows frontline responders to direct infected people to where there are resources with the information provided.
Other innovators selected include fellow African, Dr Amal Kasry who will be receiving support on the joint project between the British University in Egypt (BUE) and the American University in Cairo (AUC), together with their industrial partner Nano Gate, to create a novel optical sensor that can be used for earlier detection and diagnosis of COVID-19.
Angel Desai, who will get support for her work with ISID’s ProMED using digital epidemic surveillance data to produce AI-guided, actionable forecasts in real-time in support of outbreak response and humanitarian health emergency activities across the globe.
Lastly, Blaine Doyle, the Founder and CEO of GlowDx will receive support to continue scaling his company, GlowDx, and its testing efforts across Latin America in the battle against COVID-19.
Currently, GlowDx is focused on adapting their home testing model to COVID-19, enabling people to get access to testing for COVID-19 while sheltering in place.
Up to $20,000 in Funding
The innovators awarded the PandemicTech fellowship 2020 will receive a total of US $100,000 in funding. Each fellow will receive between $2,000 — $20,000 based on the funding needed for each specific project.
The awards can be a combination of grant funding and equity investment depending on the project type, stage, and specific fiscal needs. However, the makeup of funding will be determined by PandemicTech Team.
Apart from receiving funds and execution of projects, PandemicTech fellows are expected to join the PandemicTech advisory network and contribute to the PandemicTech innovation community during the course of their fellowship.
They will also have full access to the resources of the PandemicTech community during and after the course of the fellowship.
PandemicTech is a virtual technology incubator founded four years ago in Austin, Texas, USA. Since its creation, the incubator has provided global health security innovators with the mentorship, expertise and funding needed to bring their inventive ideas from concept to real-world execution.
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