Grace Ashiru
Ubenwa, a cutting-edge health technology startup that diagnoses infants between the ages of 0 and 6 months using artificial intelligence and machine learning, has raised USD 2.5M in pre-seed capital to develop its operations.
The fund round was spearheaded by Radical Ventures and included participation from previous investor AIX Ventures, Canadian politician Marc Bellemare, business people Pieter Abbeel and Richard Socher, and Hugo Larochelle from Google Brain,winner of the Turing Award Yoshua Bengio.
In 2017, Charles Onu, a Nigerian with expertise in the medical field and a substantial amount of practice with AI, created the startup company in Montreal. Ubenwa has established itself as the industry leader in automated sound-based newborn diagnoses by integrating cutting-edge AI technology with years of detailed research.
The results of Ubenwa’s program showed a 40 per cent increase above APGAR scoring, which is the conventionally accepted physical evaluation given immediately after delivery. During successful pilot research aimed at determining the extent of brain impairment brought on by birth asphyxia.
Ubenwa is working on creating a diagnostic tool that can determine whether or not a baby’s cries are, in fact, a request for medical aid. Our long-term objective is to develop a translation system for the noises that babies make when they are in distress, which will provide a non-invasive method for detecting and diagnosing health issues in infants wherever they may be found: birthing rooms, neonatal and pediatric intensive care units, nurseries, and even homes,” Someone said
Because it has formed strategic connections with some of the most prestigious institutions in Nigeria, Brazil, and Canada, Ubenwa can brag about possessing the most extensive and diverse library of clinically annotated infants to cry sounds.
