The Healthy Enterprise

In this episode, Sona Shah, and Co-Founder and CEO  of Neopenda, shares her journey from engineering to healthcare innovation. She discusses the challenges of healthcare inequities in emerging markets and how Neopenda's flagship product, NeoGuard, aims to address these issues by providing vital signs monitoring in under-resourced hospitals. Sona highlights the importance of understanding customer needs, the challenges of product adoption, and the innovative approaches taken to ensure sustainability and growth in the healthcare sector. In this conversation, Sona Shah discusses the importance of data collection in underserved communities, the evolution of her leadership style over the past decade, and the balance between personal and professional life as a founder. She also shares insights on the growth phase of her company, Neopenda, and the strategies for fundraising and scaling operations to meet the needs of patients globally.

Guest Information:
  • Guest's Name: Sona Shah
  • Guest's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonarshah/ 
  • Company / Affiliation: Neopenda https://www.neopenda.com/
  • Guest's Bio: Sona Shah is the Co-Founder and CEO  of Neopenda, where she leads the development of innovative medical technologies designed for low-resource healthcare settings. Inspired by her time teaching in Kenya and her background in biomedical engineering, Sona co-founded Neopenda in 2015 to help close critical gaps in care across emerging markets. Today, she and her team are bringing solutions like the neoGuard monitoring system to countries such as Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana—advancing accessible, tech-driven healthcare for the next billion people.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Neopenda and Sona Shah
01:22 Sona's Journey: From Engineering to Healthcare
05:43 Identifying Healthcare Inequities in Emerging Markets
10:06 The Birth of Neopenda: Addressing Global Health Challenges
12:50 Innovating Medical Technology: The NeoGuard Device
18:15 Challenges in Adoption and Customer Feedback
21:53 Sustaining Innovation: Revenue Models and Future Plans
25:23 Data Collection in Underserved Communities
30:32 Leadership and Team Dynamics
37:00 Balancing Personal and Professional Life
41:52 Growth and Fundraising Strategies


Takeaways:
  • Sona Shah's journey reflects a passion for addressing healthcare inequities.
  • Neopenda was founded to tackle the lack of medical technology in emerging markets.
  • The NeoGuard device is designed for low-resource settings, providing essential monitoring.
  • Understanding the local healthcare environment is crucial for product adoption.
  • Customer feedback is vital for improving product performance and satisfaction.
  • Sustaining innovation requires a balance between product sales and customer support.
  • The healthcare market in emerging countries is often misunderstood regarding affordability.
  • Data collection from NeoGuard can provide valuable insights for healthcare providers.
  • Training and support are essential for successful technology adoption in hospitals.
  • Future plans include introducing a data-driven revenue model with NeoCloud. 
  • Data collection is crucial for understanding health in underserved communities.
  • Leadership involves trusting and empowering your team.
  • Balancing personal life with professional responsibilities is essential for well-being.
  • Growth opportunities must be approached strategically to avoid pitfalls.
  • The healthcare sector requires innovative solutions tailored to specific populations.
  • Mental health support is vital for founders managing stress and responsibilities.
  • Community investment can enhance growth and bring diverse expertise.
  • Celebrating small wins is important for maintaining morale in a startup.
  • Nature and personal time can rejuvenate and provide clarity.
  • The journey of a founder is filled with challenges but also immense rewards.


Creators and Guests

Host
Heath Fletcher
With over 30 years in creative marketing and visual storytelling, I’ve built a career on turning ideas into impact. From brand transformation to media production, podcast development, and outreach strategies, I craft compelling narratives that don’t just capture attention—they accelerate growth and drive measurable results.
Producer
Meghna Deshraj
Meghna Deshraj is the CEO and Founder of Bullzeye Growth Partners, a strategic consultancy that helps businesses scale sustainably and profitably. With a background spanning corporate strategy, IT, finance, and process optimization, she combines analytical rigor with creative execution to drive measurable results. Under her leadership, Bullzeye has generated over $580M in annual growth and more than $1B in client revenue, guiding organizations through large-scale integrations, business transformations, and organizational change initiatives. A Certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Meghna’s superpower lies in strategic marketing and growth consulting, helping businesses grow through innovation, efficiency, and strong, trusted partnerships.
Guest
Sona Shah
Sona Shah is the CEO and Co-Founder of Neopenda, where she leads the development of innovative medical technologies designed for low-resource healthcare settings. Inspired by her time teaching in Kenya and her background in biomedical engineering, Sona co-founded Neopenda in 2015 to help close critical gaps in care across emerging markets. Today, she and her team are bringing solutions like the neoGuard monitoring system to countries such as Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana—advancing accessible, tech-driven healthcare for the next billion people.

What is The Healthy Enterprise?

Join host Heath Fletcher on The Healthy Enterprise as he explores how healthcare leaders and innovators are transforming the industry from the inside out. Whether you’re a provider, tech entrepreneur, marketing strategist, or industry executive, these conversations deliver actionable strategies, innovative solutions, and human-centered insights to help you grow, lead, and make a lasting impact.

Created and Produced by Bullzeye Global Growth Partners — Let’s build it together!

Speaker 1:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Healthy Enterprise podcast. Thank you for joining me again today. If you've been here before, I appreciate you coming back. And if it's your first, listen, I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 1:

Joined today by Sona Shah. She's the CEO and cofounder of Neopenda, a company bringing life saving medical technology to the places that need it most. Inspired by her time teaching in Kenya and fueled by a background in biomedical engineering, Sona cofounded Neopenda to tackle health care inequities in emerging markets. Their flagship product, NeoGuard, helps frontline providers deliver better care in overcrowded, under resourced hospitals around the Please welcome my guest, Sona Shah. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Sona, welcome to this episode. Thank you for joining me today. I'm looking forward to hearing, about you and your career path and and what's brought you to this stage and and about about your company. So when we start with doing a little bit of an you can do a little introduction of yourself to the listeners, and and we'll take it from there.

Speaker 2:

Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be here. I'm so I'm Sona. I'm CEO and cofounder of Neopanda.

Speaker 2:

We design medical technologies for emerging markets. But I'd really love to tell you a little bit about my background because it's not a super linear pathway to actually getting to where we are. But I

Speaker 1:

think Yes. I was looking at your background, and I was trying to map it out. But

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's a yeah. I can walk you through it a little bit.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Let's do it.

Speaker 2:

I studied chemical engineering at Georgia Tech, and actually this morning was really honored to be on the 40 under 40 list. So really excited to

Speaker 1:

be Congratulations.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. I appreciate that. It's it's sometimes, impostor syndrome to see everybody else who's on that list. But, anyway, went to Georgia Tech for undergrad. I studied chemical engineering and, graduated a semester early.

Speaker 2:

And so I had a job lined up in pharma, but didn't wanna start that immediately. So I went to Western Kenya, as one does, and became a primary school teacher. So really nothing to do with engineering, but I loved it. It was this beautiful community. It didn't have running water.

Speaker 2:

It didn't have electricity, so very different than what I grew

Speaker 1:

up with.

Speaker 2:

And I became a lot stronger, and the kids stopped laughing at me towards the end of it when I was carrying my buckets of water. They were, you know, full by the end of the trip. I was there for several months and just it was this incredible experience. And I loved every second of it except for the inequities that I was fortunate not to have growing up. Some were in health care, but it was kind of across the board in many different areas.

Speaker 2:

And I'd gone in as a naive American thinking, I can change the world, and then Right. Realized I don't know that I actually did much for the community. But what it did do was really open my eyes to how a lot of the world lives and, how different cultures are and how beautiful and incredible all of them are. So that's what it did for me. I brought those inequities, brought those experiences back to The US, started working in pharma.

Speaker 2:

Again, totally different world. I was in bioprocess research and development, and I was there for a few years. All the medications we're creating were going through clinical trials, and so it was a really fun part of the organization. I really loved the engineering, really loved the health care side of it, understood a little bit more about why does it take so long for a drug to actually get to market. And so just going through all of these different pieces and getting my feet wet, first job out of college, and and I loved it, but I kept thinking that the kids that I taught in Kenya may never see the medications that I was helping make.

Speaker 2:

And eventually, that ate away at me enough that I decided to go back to graduate school to somehow figure out how do we provide equitable access to health care around the world. I didn't know how to do that. So I went to grad school, and I went to Columbia University for my master's in biomedical engineering and picked the lab because I there was a picked the university because there was a lab creating an HIV and syphilis diagnostic. I also wanted to have access to nonprofits, and so I interned at the TB Alliance creating tuberculosis medications. And so doing a few different things at once, living the really true New York lifestyle of roommates with bedbugs, too many jobs, no money, but it was a

Speaker 1:

really Juggling. Street street juggling.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Throw that in there. Might might as well. But it was just it's such an incredible experience to have the access to all of that. And it was really in my second semester that I found my calling.

Speaker 2:

I met Tess, my now cofounder, and we started, a biodesign or we started in a biodesign course together where we started exploring neonatal mortality, newborn mortality, and why is it so much higher in low and middle income countries than in The US. And, of course, there's about a thousand problems that are contributing to that, but tinkering in our lab in New York wasn't gonna get us, anywhere. And so we did a ton of voice of customer research. We entered the venture competition, got some funding, and used that to go out to Uganda, and we did a needs assessment out there. And for those of you who haven't been, not just in Uganda, but in low resource settings around the world, every single hospital we have gone into was overcrowded, and it was understaffed.

Speaker 2:

And I think the first ward I had gone into, there were a 150 babies. They were on tables. They were in chairs. They were everywhere, and this is our equivalent of a NICU. And they're with these 150 babies, the first ward that I had gone into, there were two nurses.

Speaker 2:

Compare that to a US NICU where the ratio is maybe two babies to one nurse. So, of course, these ratios are drastically different, and what we realized is that this isn't a Uganda thing. This is low resource settings around the world. This is Yeah. Almost every single hospital.

Speaker 2:

We just don't hear about it. We just don't know about it. No. And to make things worse, there was no medical equipment in these hospitals. The only equipment we saw was quite literally collecting dust in a corner or room that nurses call to the equipment graveyard, And it's exactly what we're featuring.

Speaker 2:

It's just a mound full of broken medical equipment because even if we donate the equipment, what happens when it needs continuous power and we don't have continuous power? What happens when dust gets into our equipment and fries the electronics? Who comes to fix it? And so equipment often gets donated, ends up in this graveyard, and nurses are challenged with caring for these patients without any tools to help guide therapy. So Wow.

Speaker 2:

We started Neependa ten years ago.

Speaker 1:

Wow. There's a story in a nutshell. Sounds like a book in there somewhere.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I've got many books in here. There's no time to write them nor the expertise in in how to write them.

Speaker 1:

So, I mean, the the common thread and all that is that you're a serial start up. Yeah. That's You you love starting them up. Like, you're you you have a passion for it. So you have this entrepreneurial spirit.

Speaker 1:

Have you always had that? Is it always something that seems to be you're always looking for that something that you're gonna fix or or or there's things to fix and you've gotta you're finding a solution for that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. You know, I think when you put it that way, probably. I I didn't grow up knowing really what that meant, but my dad who's been in both my parents and my sister, they've been incredible formative, influences in my life. But my dad started his company before I was born. So, you know, that was his first baby.

Speaker 2:

And so just seeing him lead, seeing him go through the challenges and navigate complexities, I I think that's always been ingrained. On the engineering side, I was the kid that, you know, the grandparents would come to when their glasses broke because I was always trying to fix the things. And so The fixer. That's always just been there. That's always kind of been part of my, what I've been interested in.

Speaker 2:

But entrepreneurship, in its true sense, I didn't really know what the word meant. One day, maybe I will release our very first venture competition, pitch deck because we've come a long way since then. It was good enough to get the funding, but we've we've definitely made some improvements, since the competition. So entrepreneurial spirit maybe has been there.

Speaker 1:

For sure.

Speaker 2:

But I I don't know that I can say I wanted to go back to grad school for entrepreneurship in particular.

Speaker 1:

No. And I think you're I think you're there based on life experience already. So and that was and you started Neopanda ten years ago. Right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Ten years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So so you you kicked it off back then. How did you how did you get that started? Like, what was what was the first step for you? Like, I mean, that's a big that's a big idea. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

How did you launch that?

Speaker 2:

Honestly, it's one step at a time, and we didn't really know what we were doing. That's fine. That's part of startup life. So Yep. I I think the the biggest thing that I would say here is find a problem worth solving, and then you'll figure out how to do the rest of it.

Speaker 2:

So when we had gone to Uganda, Tessa and I were there, and we just realized that we could use our biomedical engineering backgrounds to design med tech that functions anywhere in the world. Where you are born and where you live shouldn't determine whether you live, and Mhmm. Health care and high quality access to health care should be a fundamental right all over the world. But it's not, and there aren't enough people that are focused on doing something like this. Admittedly, it is extraordinarily challenging now having gone through ten years of it.

Speaker 2:

It's Sure. Lots of mountains that we are moving on a daily basis. But if nobody does it, then that's why, you know, something as simple as our adult science monitor doesn't exist out there. And so we the first step was really just acknowledging that we needed to create a company out of it, and so we started the Appendix and spun it out of the university, and we did an accelerator program. So we were two engineering students that knew nothing about business, and so we did an accelerator.

Speaker 2:

And so that was a really fun time because we were

Speaker 1:

Good experience.

Speaker 2:

Doing it while in grad school, and we did this accelerator in Maryland. So we were commuting Maryland all the way up to New York, and so that's a story for another day as well. But it was a full time accelerator called relevant health, and that's where we were introduced to a lot more of what does it take to go from this breadboard that we created in our lab in New York to a fully functional product and let our product drive and and vice versa.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And just kind of thinking about all of the things around that. So it's a five month accelerator crash course, and we are with an incredible cohort that just was going through all the same trials and tribulations and just trying to understand what things meant. And I think that was kind of really a pivotal moment for us where we started to gain some initial traction. We started to get our initial big funding. The accelerator pride provided some level of funding, which was great, but they also helped us learn what it took to actually get additional funding.

Speaker 2:

And so we we got some of our earliest funding, I think, immediately after program, some of it from Vodafone America's Foundation and Cisco, and we entered into business plan. And so just really starting to get our feet wet there. Our journey over the past ten years just at a high level, we spent the first six ish years in research and development on the first product, NeoGuard, which I'm sure we'll talk more about. But we spent about six ish years on r and d for that. We received regulatory clearance, on the product in 2021, and that led to our launch first in Kenya.

Speaker 2:

Now we've grown to Uganda and Ghana. We're excited to have sold our first product to over 50 hospitals that are actively using our devices on a daily basis. And so a lot of what we've learned in this process is that innovation is not just on the product. There's a lot of innovation that has to happen on the the business, the customer support, the supply chain, every single aspect, particularly given the market that we're operating in. So it's been a really fun journey.

Speaker 1:

There's many moving parts, isn't there, once you start rolling into it. So let's talk about the device then. Let's talk about what you actually created and what's being used out there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And so as you're thinking about, you know, what this picture of a really overcrowded, understaffed wards looks like, we wanted to figure out how do we help empower nurses. How do we give them the tools that they need to identify which patients actually needed their attention so that they can provide more timely and appropriate care to their patients. Vital signs monitoring has been around for decades. We didn't invent that, but Vital Signs Monitor doesn't exist across most of the hospitals that we operate in.

Speaker 2:

That's gold standard around the world. Why doesn't it exist? It's because traditional equipment is bulky. It's expensive. It's hard to maintain.

Speaker 2:

It requires consumables that aren't locally available. And so for a variety of reasons, traditional equipment just fails in in most emerging markets. So that's why we created NeoGuard. This is our NeoGuard wearable device. It's a vital signs monitor that continuously measures pulse rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and temperature in a simple headband, and then the vitals wirelessly connect to a centralized dashboard on a tablet.

Speaker 2:

So clinicians can look at one screen and be able to tell what's going on with all their patients. We trend all the data over time. We alert when the vitals go outside of healthy ranges. Up to 15 patients can be visualized from one screen. So really taking kind of that traditional and bulky equipment and paring it down to the essentials that most of our hospitals need.

Speaker 2:

So

Speaker 1:

all that information can be got can be extracted just from a headband?

Speaker 2:

Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. So

Speaker 2:

Yeah. There's two sensors, on the back of the headband. This is our pulse oximeter, which normally measures pulse rate oxygen saturation. If you're not familiar, when you go to the doctor, they put the finger clip on you. That's pulse exemitter.

Speaker 1:

That measures. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's just a different form of that, and we our algorithms can also get respiratory rate off of it. And then we've got a temperature sensor. So four different vitals from one small device that's designed specifically within for our emerging markets.

Speaker 1:

And that's wireless, so it transmits to a centralized monitoring station.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. So we provide a tablet. It transmits over Bluetooth low energy, so it allows, you know, each wearable device to connect to a tablet. Our devices are battery operated, so it it lasts for thirty six hours without having to recharge. Then you can just pop it out, recharge the battery, wipe everything down with alcohol, and then it's ready for reuse on the next patient.

Speaker 1:

Gosh. It's so cool. Thanks.

Speaker 2:

Wow. That's really awesome. I'm biased.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. No. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. And so when you first sort of, like, started showing this and and and, you know, you know, introducing this to people, what kind of a response did you get?

Speaker 1:

Kinda like that? Oh my god. This is so cool.

Speaker 2:

So, honestly, initially, it was a little bit of a mixed bag, to be honest. I I Really? Yeah. The concept of it is incredible, and I think everybody just understands the importance of what we're doing. Hospitals understand the importance.

Speaker 2:

The reason why I say it's a mixed bag is because product market fit is so essential, especially in our markets. If a device is not integrated into a nurse's normal workflow, they're too busy to deal with it. They just Yeah. You know, it's not worth it. And Gotta

Speaker 1:

they gotta learn one more thing or

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

It's one more app or one more software.

Speaker 2:

And by design, we look different. We act different. We are a different type of product than your traditional vital signs monitors. So we spent about a year and a half of our initial launch in product market fit, and part of that was understanding, okay. We have regulatory clearance.

Speaker 2:

Now we have CE Mark on the product, which is European FDA. We have CE Mark on the product and local regulatory in Kenya. Who actually is gonna buy this product? And so we started out with a distributor who was a great partner for us, and we realized that distributors have the network. They know how to sell products, but they know how to sell hundreds of products.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

Products that has no name and no brand is is difficult thing to sell, and we were gonna be our best salespeople. So we switched our model after this product market fit phase. But even before that, once we got into hospitals, the next question was, do our customers like the product, and what feedback are we getting? So we got feedback that didn't necessarily come up in clinical trials no matter how robustly we designed them, but commercial use is always going to be a bit different. So some of the feedback was more minor around the alarms are too loud in our small private hospital.

Speaker 2:

So can you decrease decrease the the volume volume to to performance issues that we just hadn't seen on patients? But by nature of being on more and more patients, you're going to see more things. Right. So we realized the importance of kind of taking all of that feedback, aggregating it, making improvements to the product, and that's what's now led to our 90% plus customer satisfaction. So Oh.

Speaker 2:

You know, now it's been really great that our customers love the product. Nice. We've seen incredible utilization over fifty thousand hours of monitoring with our system across thousands of patients. Of course, there are always things that we need to fix, and we're very attentive to what those things are. But it's nice that the product performance is consistently improving, and our customers are really appreciating the customer support that we provide to them.

Speaker 2:

And

Speaker 1:

did the did the nurses find that, you know, once they adopted this this device, it was an easy thing to understand, and they they realized that, oh, yeah. We can we can we can bring this on without too much of a stretch.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. I think so we do a lot of training. The initial training is not super long. It's pretty easy to get people to know how to use product.

Speaker 2:

It's been designed to be user, user friendly. That being said, we see a lot of nurse turnover in our hospitals. And so one of the things that we had to think a little bit more about is how do we provide refresher trainings to our facilities when there is turnover, new nurses coming in, new nurses leaving, just what does that look like? And so we do provide more routine training to a lot of our nurses just to ensure that everybody knows how to use the product. It's pretty intuitive once you Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Once you start working with the product, and so it's it's not a huge lift. We do find that sometimes there's a a generational gap, and I think this is true for any technology. So your more experienced nurses prefer a more traditional piece of equipment because that's what they're used to. That's what they've been using for decades. And our our less experienced nurses can pick it up even faster than I can.

Speaker 2:

So Oh, yeah. You know, it's it's incredible to just see what that looks like, but you need both sides of it. We need

Speaker 1:

For sure.

Speaker 2:

We need the experience as nurses. We need the younger nurses, and it's been really exciting to just see both of them adopt the product really well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up that part about, you know, understanding the market and understanding what was what is gonna be pushed back. Because you're you you got this great device, and this is gonna be work great. And then people are like, wait. Wait.

Speaker 1:

Wait. Wait. I don't I don't have time for this. I don't I I can't add any more things to this. And I've had several conversations with people about frontline people, primarily nurses, who you've gotta they've gotta adopt it.

Speaker 1:

They have to be on board because they're not gonna just bring on something that's gonna expand their workload or extend their time or complicate their life on a daily basis. It's already complicated enough. So Definitely. That's really interesting that that that end up being part of your your research process, and you're able to kinda get through that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I think it's one of the things that we're most proud of is that, yes, of of well, two things. One, we can actually sell to our hospitals. And this is a market where traditionally equipment is donated into our hospitals. Their perception is that hospitals can't afford products.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

There are limited resources for sure. Sure. And so we have to balance that. But 50 plus hospitals is not an anomaly. That's not a, you know, one off hospital that's purchasing products that this is, you know, proven that public, private, counties, you know, governments can purchase a product at a price point that is affordable, and we're really proud to be paving the way.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Paving the way means that there's no playbook, so we're doing a lot of trial and error. We're making the mistakes. We're learning from the mistakes, and we're trying something else. And so there is a lot of trial and error in that.

Speaker 2:

But the other part of it is that customer adoption and understanding what does it take for a device to actually get adopted. Mhmm. That's a really hard thing to figure out, and a lot of it, we're still figuring out. How do we scale something that it does require a little bit more human touch on the customer support side? There are a lot of pieces around that.

Speaker 2:

We're servicing 50 hospitals. What happens when we're in thousand hospitals? How do we make sure that we can still provide that same level of customer support? So it's an exciting next phase, next chapter for us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Exciting problems to have Exactly. Is there you know, for, you know, in in when you're developing a product, there's always well, are we gonna have something that they need to purchase on a regular basis moving forward? Is there software updates? Is there oh, we gotta add this piece of equipment on.

Speaker 1:

Are did you are you is it does it work like that, or is it kinda like, oh, you buy it. It's great. It works. Really, there's not much more to it after that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So this is an interesting question because with the markets that we operate in, the ability to pay for recurring, you know, product is a lot more challenging. Sure. If you talk to any investor, they only want to see a SaaS recurring revenue model. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So it's

Speaker 1:

this Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Interesting balance and for for good reason. You know, I understand the logic behind it.

Speaker 1:

How do you sustain it? Once you sell it once you sell it, how do you sustain it and keep the company in business if you have to? If you only sell it once Right. What is where what else

Speaker 2:

is that? To keep selling to lots and lots of hospitals and, know, that it is an interesting challenge to have. And so we we've seen both sides of it. How we are approaching it is by design, we didn't put any consumables into the product. There's no recurring revenue directly from the existing product.

Speaker 2:

We did that by design. We don't think that the hospitals should have consumables. That's where things break down. If you can't you know, the the first the hospitals here in The US, all of the equipment has single use probes or sensors, then you have to toss that. Nothing in Africa is ever single use, and so now you're potentially introducing infection from one patient to the next or all sorts of things that create complexity.

Speaker 2:

So by design, we wanted our product to, be reusable and not have any consumables. That, of course, makes it challenging to have a recurring revenue model when you don't have any consumables. Right. So the way that we're addressing that is twofold. One, we have a pseudo recurring revenue model.

Speaker 2:

What I mean by that is the exact same hospital customer starts out with a pilot number of devices to make sure that they like it, but it's usually not sufficient to meet the demand that is needed directly in the ward itself. And then because we've also designed for the smallest patient populations, it's very easy for us to sell this product to pediatric and adult wards. Exact same customer, exact same distribution channel, our same salespeople that are going to the same hospital. They already have trust in their product, and so now we can get them to buy more and more product, and that becomes a pseudo rep recurring revenue model. Beyond that, there is a tremendous amount of data that we're collecting with our system that allows, we can pull all of that data, anonymize it, of course, with all of the data privacy considerations in place, aggregate it, and now we can generate unique insights for hospitals.

Speaker 2:

Many of these hospitals don't have existing electronic medical records or, that's a lot of the the efforts are just paper charts right now, but they're just so much invaluable data that we're collecting automatically from our system. Yeah. Remove the errors of translating from a paper chart into an electronic system. And now we can have unique insights that these hospitals are looking for. And it's not just hospitals.

Speaker 2:

It's NGOs, ministries of health, pharma companies, med device companies. The list goes on and on for the type of data that we can collect on the ground in the field. That's where we can introduce, referring revenue model. We'll introduce NeoCloud to the market next year, so stay tuned for more updates on that.

Speaker 1:

That's very cool. Sorry. What was the last thing you said? You introduced Neo what?

Speaker 2:

NeoCloud. That's the

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's what that oh. Is definitely NeoCloud. Okay. I like that. Yep.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's great. Well, it's it's great too because you're you're talking about collecting data from places and communities that you you don't probably there isn't probably a lot of data on Yeah. Which is you we've got lots of data on North American hospitals and and developed countries, but we don't have as much information on on under underdeveloped or low income countries as well. Right? So that that's that's massive.

Speaker 1:

I mean, particularly if you're trying to do any kind of research Mhmm. On those groups of communities. That's really cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's it's extraordinarily important for us because even when we first started this, we didn't have access to any data. It just didn't really exist, and so you have to create your own. But think about what we could do if we aggregate all of that data and actually provide

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

What's happening in the field. Especially now in a lot of today's world, you know, demographic health surveys were often done by organizations like USAID. Now in a world where that doesn't exist, what happens with these DHS surveys or what happens with some of these things that happen, you know, fairly infrequently. It happens every couple of years, because it takes so much effort to go from facility to fill facility and understand what's actually happening. What if we can collect that data automatically from our system and actually do something more meaningful with it?

Speaker 2:

So that's, that's the process that we're in right now is understanding how can we use this data for broader global health initiatives, what actions can actually be taken from it. I think as society, we've gone through these phases of there's no data, period. And then there's too much data, and we don't know what to do with it.

Speaker 1:

We do with all this data?

Speaker 2:

Right. Exactly. And so now we're trying to be pretty strategic around let's collect the data that is actually meaningful and can drive systemic change.

Speaker 1:

Would there be a way, like, say, you know, I like, I'm doing a study, and I want this kind of information. Would you be able to adapt the device to pull different types of information?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I think that's a future next step for us as well. There's a lot of things that I think we can pull off of it. It's not just the vital signs data. Our app includes things like gestational age for our patients, their their weight at birth, diagnoses, a lot of different information that gets pulled into the system.

Speaker 1:

So it gets programmed into that, so it's attached to that device. Oh, cool. Yeah. There's a

Speaker 2:

of things there. And that data can also be fed into machine learning, into AI. So we've actually got a project ongoing right now and that recently kicked off where we're doing a clinical trial to look at clinical decision support. So with our vital signs data amongst other parameters, can we help guide clinicians on what type of oxygen therapy does a patient need? We can detect already with our our NeoGuard monitor that a patient needs oxygen.

Speaker 2:

But do they need to be on CPAP? Do they need to be on a nasal cannula? Do they need to be on a ventilator? Can we help predict what the next pathway should be for them? And can we help hospitals predict what their equipment needs should be?

Speaker 2:

Based on our data, can we tell a hospital 30 of your patients need oxygen? You only have capacity for five percent. Now there's data to suggest that you need to increase your capacity of oxygen to meet the demands of your patients. So it's pretty early stage, but we're really excited about the project and and running this trial. So, again, stay tuned for more details on that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. For the Neo Cloud. Yeah. And you said the Neo Guard, that's the name of the device that you showed us.

Speaker 2:

Wearable device. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then you also said something about it's not just for newborns or babies. It's adults, all ages, all sizes, head of heads, everything. Right? So it's not restricted to that. I wanted to clarify that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Not restricted. We are focused primarily in the neonatal space. It's kind of a patient population most vulnerable. So that's where a lot of our focus is right now.

Speaker 2:

As we expand to pediatric and adult patients, some of the feedback we've received, understandably, is that we'd like to test on multiple locations on the body. So we are looking at validating on the upper arm for adults. And so we're we're looking at introducing that next year as well just with the next iteration of our hardware, the the latest and greatest of it.

Speaker 1:

Wow. That's very cool. Where did the name come from?

Speaker 2:

So NeoPanda is Neo is for originally for baby. Now because we're not just baby, we're thinking of it as innovative. We're new. And Penda is part Swahili for love. So originally baby love.

Speaker 2:

Oh.

Speaker 1:

They love nice. Oh, I like that. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's nice. And the branding is really nice too, by the way. Really like it. Okay. So you've already talked about, you know, expansion and scalability.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk a little bit about your professional journey. You know, you're now ten years into this into this company, and your role is CEO and founder. Right? Cofounder?

Speaker 2:

Cofounder. Yep.

Speaker 1:

So how how are you how is your professional leadership CEO persona developed through all of this? What do you how how did you grow as a leader and as a as a founder and a CEO over this last ten years with with the company?

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of learnings still to go. And I think the past ten years have been just transformational in in the way that I think about the world, the way that I like to lead, the way that I like to listen, and and a lot of it is driven by human centered design and by people. Our team is and always will be our strongest asset. No matter how incredible the product is, we can't do any of this without the team. So my philosophy is very much that we hire people that are smarter and the best at what they do and are driven towards the mission and vision of the company.

Speaker 2:

And that's not the mission and vision of today. That's the mission and vision of what we can be. And so, you know, when I think about leadership, I think about the 10 people that are working on the team that are fighting tirelessly against the the mountains that we have to move on a daily basis, and they're the ones that are doing it. So, you know, all of the all of the kudos, all of the traction goes to our team. And when I think about leadership, it's definitely been a huge journey.

Speaker 2:

When we first started, it was Tess and I. Of course, the two people that lived off of no salary and that were we just cared so deeply. We've, you know, went to a conference in Germany once. This is a funny side story, but in some of our early days, we went to a conference in Germany, and we're, like, bootstrapping our way to get there. We stayed in a hostel because we had no money, and there there's a really funny image.

Speaker 2:

Maybe I'll share it with you afterwards, but it's of the two of us sitting in the stairwell eating McDonald's because we did we couldn't afford anything else, and that was the only place where there was Wi Fi in this hospital. So we've come a little bit further than that. But that's the two of us, you know, and and we care very deeply about what we're doing, and so we are willing to do pretty much anything. And and, honestly, probably still would. But as you continue to grow the team, our team will do pretty much anything, but that's a that's a little extreme.

Speaker 2:

I will not ask our team to do that. But there is a lot of there's a lot of ownership that you have to give up. You know, as you bring on new team members that have deeper expertise, there's a lot of letting go. Even between Tessa and I, we had to as a biomedical engineer, I loved the product side. I loved the engineering side, but we needed to split roles.

Speaker 2:

And my forte, my expertise was more so actually on the business side, and Tess is leading our she's our CTO and leads all of our product development. And so just understanding kind of the divvying up of responsibilities early on and where we excel, where we don't excel. I'm usually, you know, the I've got 10,000 ideas, and maybe one of those 10,000 ideas is good, like, really, really good. Tess is really great at bringing me back into reality and saying, like

Speaker 1:

She's your grounder.

Speaker 2:

The good one. Exactly. And so I think just understanding where you excel and just accepting that. Of course, we can always improve. We can always grow in that area, and and I strive for that on a daily basis.

Speaker 2:

How do I do things better every single day? But, you know, I think that's that's part of it. Part of it is letting ownership go to your team when they do have that expertise and figuring out how do you now manage them. How do you manage somebody that's smarter than you? That's hard.

Speaker 2:

That's really hard to do. But that's all of our team. And so I think that's that's the piece of it that, you know, it's a constant journey. I've had coaches, over the years, and I think coaches and therapists are extraordinarily important. It's it's, I didn't realize that until a few years ago how important coaches and therapists are to the work that we do.

Speaker 2:

The the workload and the stress that we carry is pretty tremendous. And it's, I think, even more so in the health care space, which I think a lot of our listeners are in the health care space because the work that we do, it isn't just good enough for a school project. It is something that can help save a patient's life or harm them if you do it the wrong way. And so that's a really big responsibility. There's a lot of responsibility that I think as a founder, I carry as a female founder, where traditionally, I can't fail because I can't fail my fellow female founders.

Speaker 2:

I can't fail because other people need to be fighting for med tech in Africa. So I have to fight for the med tech that exists in in markets that are traditionally overlooked. I can't fail because babies are often forgotten. You know, the start of life that we all care so deeply about, But who's creating medical devices for them? We always start with adults and then work our way down, but it doesn't actually work that way.

Speaker 2:

So there are so many areas of responsibility. I have a team that I'm responsible for paying salary for and making sure that they get paid on time and they're well compensated. They're caring for their families. They're caring for, their their people. And so a lot of that is the weight that we carry as a founder, and it's often a lonely space.

Speaker 2:

I think it's not as talked about that. You know, it's I I was talking to another founder the other day, and it's interesting because as a founder, you celebrate the wins way earlier than the rest of the team because you know that the win's way earlier, but you're hedging your bets. Right? You know, something could go wrong before everything is finally done. But you also celebrate the losses.

Speaker 2:

You can foresee what is coming up, and what is going to be really detrimental. So there's a lot that goes on inside a founder's mind, and I think a lot of that weight is to show up every single day knowing that what you were doing is making a difference and carrying that. And I think that's a lot of leadership. It's knowing that when the times are tough, we care very deeply about the work that we do, we have to keep fighting even even if the days are really hard. And then what makes it easier is knowing that we can wake up every day knowing that we're improving the care for patients around the world.

Speaker 1:

It's a heavy load for sure. Like, there's a lot there's a lot on your shoulders. And and what what kind of things do you do to help lighten that? Like, I mean, the

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Your own personal health and and physical health, mental health, emotional health, you know, it's all part of holding that load up. So how do you keep how do you stay strong? How do you stay whole during all of this?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I think there's a few different ways that I personally do it. I had, I had a baby a couple years ago, so she's now two and a half, and she's my favorite human in the world. So she's Yeah. The best, the best thing.

Speaker 2:

Also

Speaker 1:

They're a motivator for sure. Sorry? They're a motivator

Speaker 2:

for sure. They're I mean, we we have to keep doing it to create a better future for our kids. So that's a that's a lot of the the motivation behind it. But the reason I bring it up is because there's a hard stop to my day. I care equally about being a founder and my commitment to the company and the patients that we're serving as well as my family.

Speaker 2:

And there's a hard stop when I have to pick her up from day care every day. That's the time. That's my time to be with my partner, with my dog, with my daughter. And, of course, some days, that's not there, and we have to adjust, and that's fine. But I care about spending that time with each other.

Speaker 2:

And so there is kind of that hard stop, which it it took me years to kinda get to that point where, I can kind of separate what's happening at work from just having a life outside of work. And a lot of my life is work, and I'm fine with that, honestly, because I love it. And I love what I do. I care about it.

Speaker 1:

It's your passion. Right?

Speaker 2:

Right. It's our passion. It's not it's not a passion project, but it is my passion. Right? It's it's Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Care deeply about the work that we do. So, yeah, my mornings often look like 5AM days, but by the time I pick up my daughter, I've got a good twelve hours in, and then I can shut down for the rest of the night, and it's great. But I think just the, the the health the mental health side of it, coaching and therapy is really tremendous. We moved out to Seattle because we wanted to be a little bit closer to nature. So I go on a bunch of hikes, and that's where I feel mentally most at peace and where I can kind of get that rejuvenation just from the beauty that nature has to offer, the quietness, the sereneness, everything around that.

Speaker 2:

And so that's part of the reason why I made the decision to move out to Seattle. Was to to be a little bit more connected there. So everyone has to find their thing, that, you know, gets them through the the tough times, and it's it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. It's not like you can just get to the next thing because the bigger we grow, the more challenges there are, the more things that we have to do, the more decisions we have to make, but the more exciting it is.

Speaker 2:

The more patients we're improving quality of care for it, the more exciting the opportunity, the more partnerships we have to really impart change in society. And so the the wait becomes, you know, equally exciting and challenging at the same time, and that grows, and you have to figure out what works best for you. For me, it's spending time with family and friends and going out on a hike and just having some time to rejuvenate. I definitely think that vacations are absolutely essential. We encourage our team to take them, and we don't we don't message them on vacation.

Speaker 2:

There is a majority of my time off is my time off. Don't talk to me unless something is truly burning, but this is my time to just disconnect.

Speaker 1:

And Yeah. You know where the fire extinguishes. Put it out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Exactly. I trust you. I hired you because you know how to do this, so go put it out. And it's great.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's needed for for everyone. It's, if you don't have that time to just mentally relax, and kind of step away from things, then how are you gonna get through it all?

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Did you know that the you well, you're in you're in the Pacific Northwest, and and so the it rains a lot. Okay. And you get this really great smell after the rain. Right?

Speaker 1:

Do you know it has a name? No. It's called Petricor.

Speaker 2:

Oh.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I did not know this. But I interviewed a guest who is a an executive coach, and her company name is Petricor. I said, what is pet what's Petricor? Where'd that name come from?

Speaker 1:

She goes, oh, that's the smell after a rain in a forest.

Speaker 2:

And I

Speaker 1:

was like, wow. Okay. I

Speaker 2:

love that.

Speaker 1:

Isn't that cool? I know it.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing.

Speaker 1:

I'm telling everyone that now. It's like,

Speaker 2:

do you know this word? New every day.

Speaker 1:

That's really cool. And I was gonna ask you something else, and I now I've now lost my track when I was when I was doing that. Oh, I know what I was gonna ask you. So now now what are you doing? Now you're at you're at a critical stage right now.

Speaker 1:

You're you're you're in the middle of some, some fundraising, aren't you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. It's the the phase of growth that we're in right now is is such an exciting phase. I think it's a good problem to have because there's too many opportunities, and I think the harder challenge is to figure out where to focus and how to Right. Scale.

Speaker 2:

And

Speaker 1:

That can be hard, actually. You know, you wanna do everything.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Exactly. We know this product is actually saving lives. How do we get it out to the hundreds of countries that need this product? But let's pump the brakes a little bit because we do see that startups often fail because they scale faster than they can.

Speaker 1:

And Yeah.

Speaker 2:

A lot of it is, of course, growth opportunity. But for us, let's talk about high level what those growth opportunities look like. We could create new products in our pipeline, because Mhmm. This isn't the only product, the only medical device that's needed in in our markets. We're ISO thirteen forty five certified.

Speaker 2:

We've got a robust design and development process and quality management system. Let's do it again. But we can also

Speaker 1:

Why not?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Why not? But we can also expand from existing, you know, neonatal patients to pediatric and adult. We can go from inpatient to outpatient, primary health care, remote patient monitoring, community health settings. We can expand geographically.

Speaker 2:

There's a million different opportunities that we have to pursue, and I think part of it is understanding what will it take for us to go from 50 hospitals to a thousand hospitals. There's a lot of back office stuff that needs to happen. Your HR processes, how do you grow from a 10 person team to a 100 person team? What are all of the policies that need to be in place that enable that enable us to keep our culture, keep our values, but still continue to grow effectively as we bring on more and more team members. What are all of the operational things around inventory and accounting and all of the pieces that have to happen behind the scenes, but often get forgotten in this phase because we're too excited to grow.

Speaker 2:

So that's the phase that we're in right now. We're in this transition to scale where we're navigating what are the most important, the most pressing, the highest urgent, needs in our markets that we should be pursuing from a growth perspective. What are the systems and infrastructure that need to happen, that need to be in place that will enable us to grow? And then we're gonna flip a light switch on, and we're gonna grow extraordinarily fast. But this transition to scale phase is extraordinarily important and will define the rest of the Neopanda's future.

Speaker 2:

So what we're doing with that is we are raising funds. We're in a pre series a round, which we're really excited about, and we're raising dually from VC funds as well as, community investment round. So to date, we've actually raised $6,000,000. Half of that has been through grants, non dilutive capital, other funds, the other half from investments. So angels, family offices, VCs, we care equally about both sides of that.

Speaker 2:

R and D is typically funded by grants because that's a riskier element of the business. Right. Investment dollars typically go to scaling what we know to be proven. As we transition to scale and go through all of these really complex challenges over the next year, we realize that it's not just capital that we need. It's expertise from individual people who want to make a difference, who want to contribute, and who want to invest in a company and change our story with us.

Speaker 2:

And so we launched a campaign on Wefunder a couple months ago. And Wefunder, for those who don't know, is a community investment platform where anybody anywhere in the world can invest in the Appendix for as little as a $100. We've gotten checks from a 100 all the way to $25,000. So it's a wide range, but we can now tap into your expertise, and we can now leverage all of the knowledge that individual people have and use that to accelerate our growth. So it's been really exciting to see, just the traction that we've gotten over the past couple of months and would encourage anybody who's interested to come talk to me and or go to wefunder.com/neappenda, and you can learn all about the campaign there.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. And where else can when and tell them about the website and where they can reach you if they wanna contact you directly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And the website, our website is justmeappended.com. It'll direct you to Wefunder if you are interested in learning more about that. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out to me. Sona Shah is I I don't remember the exact handle, but I'm sure we can put that out there.

Speaker 1:

Yep. All the links will be in the show notes. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, my LinkedIn, and then you can also feel free to email me at neopunda dot com, and and I would love to connect with anyone who's interested.

Speaker 1:

Well, I certainly hope you're gonna have some people, and I'm pretty sure you'll have some people contacting you, but it's been an amazing story. Super impressed. You guys are you and Tess have done an amazing thing, so you gotta be proud. And I just wanna thank you for your time today, Sona, and and sharing your heart and your vision and your passion for what you're doing, and wish you and Neapanda the biggest of success. And we'll be talking again because I wanna know more.

Speaker 1:

I wanna know what the next thing actually is

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

When you decide to do it.

Speaker 2:

So Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me. It was really a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Wow. That was a really inspiring story coming from Asana. She took a very nontraditional path that led her from engineering to health care, innovation, and from teaching in Kenya and recognizing a huge gap in the medical care there and then actually going out and built the solution. Super cool. It's not flashy, overbuilt, but super smart and scalable for sure.

Speaker 1:

Truly designed with the user in mind. She also got real about the challenges of scaling and managing a team and taking care of yourself as a founder or a CEO. Leadership is truly about letting go and trusting others. We've heard that before. So if you enjoyed today's conversation, hit that follow button or subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and help us get the stories like Sonas out to the world, and she can find some more investors for a really important product.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening, and I'll catch you next time when you come by and listen to the Healthy Enterprise. Have a great day.