LONDON – Ugandan Healthtech start-up, Matibabu was named as one of the three entrepreneurs of the Year at the Pitch at Palace Global 3.0 competition.
This comes months after winning the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation at the 2018 Palace Africa Pitch. Matibabu’s device tests for malaria parasites without drawing blood and founded by Brian Gitta.
Matibabu is not curing any diseases. Instead, it focusses on diagnosing malaria faster and easier so those who are infected can get treated faster. Brian Gitta is the first and youngest from Ugandan to win the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK.
23 Global entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to the audience at Pitch@Palace Global 3.0, a culmination of 45 events that have taken place in Australia, Bahrain, China, Hungary, Singapore, UAE, the UK and Vietnam in 2018.
This year’s event was held at the St James’s Palace.
The two other companies in the Entrepreneur of the Year list are:
Logivan – Uber for trucks. The solution is unifying the fragmented trucking industry in Vietnam, through a truck platform that currently has about 16,000 trucks available.
OncoRes Medical – is developing a high-resolution imaging tool to allow surgeons to accurately remove tumors, reducing the need for additional surgery, which currently occurs in 30% of cases.
Meanwhile, Brian and his team have been working on Matibabu as far back as 2013. They have participated at the Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finals, partook at the TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES in 2017 and won the UN Women Award.
Matibabu, a Swahili word that connotes – medical centre – has created as a low-cost, device that clips onto a patient’s finger which then uses light and magnetism to analyse blood composition for the tell-tale signs of a malaria infection – which affects your red blood cells. It can be used by anybody.
One of the major perks it has over a usual blood test is that you can get results back significantly faster – 2 minutes compared to normal 30 or more for the conventional test. The diagnosis software can run perfectly on both desktop and smartphone.
AlRawi from Bahrain also won a spot at the event, bagged the People’s Choice Award. The platform crosses borders with its digital capability in audiobook creation and publication of rich and engaging Arabic content, which is scalable to multiple languages.
