How Innovation in Emerging Markets Is Transforming Health Care
Global Venture’s Noor Sweid recently spoke to Worth about how emerging markets are tackling the issue of health care inclusion and what the future of health will look like as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the only Arab woman in the Middle East running a VC fund and the first woman to lead an IPO in the region, Noor Sweid (pictured below), founder of Dubai-based growth-focused venture capital firm Global Ventures, is a force to be reckoned. With a focus on enterprise technology investments, her first $50 million fund has backed founders of innovative and disruptive companies in emerging markets with the ability to scale. And since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Global Ventures has begun investing heavily in health tech.
As a big believer in health care inclusion, Sweid has made closing the health care gap a priority. In April, Global Ventures led a $7 million, Series-A round for Helium Health, West Africa’s leading electronic medical records (EMR) provider that’s accelerating health care accessibility throughout the region. Worth recently had the chance to speak with Sweid to discuss tackling the issue of health care inclusion and what the future of health will look like as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q: I’ve read that a lot of VC firms are pivoting a bit into the health care tech space, especially due to COVID. So, I wanted to get your take on what the landscape looks like for these new companies that are emerging in that space right now. What are you seeing? Are you seeing a lot of great ideas or is it a bit more of a rocky landscape?
A: I’ll speak from our side of the world, and I’ll speak more globally about what we’re seeing. So, from our side of the world, we’re seeing a little bit of the usual split between emulation and innovation. And so, there was this whole emulation on let’s build telehealth platforms, let’s build diagnostic platforms, the stuff that’s already been tried and done elsewhere. Let’s do that, that’s easy, low-risk, low-hanging fruit, we did that.
Related How the Coronavirus Epidemic Is Accelerating the Transition to Digital Health
On the innovation side, we’re just closing an investment in an augmented reality (AR) company for operating rooms, for hospitals, for surgeries and they have now expanded into the UK. She’s working with the NHS, she’s signed contracts with J&J and medical device companies. But that originally started as working on cleft lips and palates for children in war zones. So that’s really innovation—necessity is the mother of creation. And that’s where that came from, and that happened in emerging markets, and then it went on to other markets. Then we’re seeing a lot of the telehealth stuff, which is just emulation.
But even on the emulation, there’s no legacy platforms, and so they’re able to leapfrog, kind of like what happened with fintech. So, it’s the same thing.
That makes sense. How does AR in an operating room work?
Oh, it’s super cool. So, there’s two parts to it. The first part is it’s live streaming with a specialist surgeon to help the practicing surgeon through a surgery, because they don’t have the specialist expertise. And the reason hospitals want to do that is because the biggest mortality rates in certain surgeries are actually between the East Coast and the Midwest, rather than between Uganda and the UK. So, it’s literally about the surgeons that don’t have the specialist expertise that need to do something. So you stream in the specialist surgeon, and then you take the imaging that you’ve done on the patient pre-surgery and just superimpose that onto a screen, and then there’s a glove that may or may not be worn, depending on the type of surgery, that the practicing surgeon can wear, that superimposes where their hand is onto the images and allows the specialist surgeon to walk them through it.
