The investment aims to develop advanced digital infrastructure in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, promoting secure and equitable technology access. 

Microsoft has recently made a move in the AI realm with a hefty US$1.5 billion investment in G42, a prominent AI technology holding company based in the UAE. This investment aims to bolster the collaboration between the two entities, facilitating the introduction of Microsoft AI technologies and educational initiatives in the UAE and other global markets. Additionally, Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, will join the G42 Board of Directors as part of the expanded partnership.

Enhanced collaboration and technological empowerment

The partnership will focus on enabling organizations of various sizes in new markets to utilize AI and cloud technologies while adhering to top-tier standards for safety and security. Building on their longstanding cooperation in AI and digital transformation, the investment by Microsoft will further solidify their mutual commitment to this strategic alliance. G42 will leverage Microsoft Azure to run its AI applications and services and jointly deliver advanced AI solutions to global public sector clients and large enterprises.

Regional development and infrastructure expansion

Together, G42 and Microsoft aim to extend advanced AI and digital infrastructure to nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. This initiative is designed to provide equitable access to services that address critical governmental and business needs, maintaining the highest standards of security and privacy.

H.H. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Chairman of G42, emphasized that Microsoft’s investment represents a critical moment in G42’s growth and innovation journey, highlighting the strategic alignment and shared goals of both organizations. “This partnership is a testament to the shared values and aspirations for progress, fostering greater cooperation and synergy globally,” he remarked.

Skilling initiatives and workforce development

The collaboration also includes a commitment to developing a skilled and diverse AI workforce. This includes a US$1 billion investment in a development fund aimed at nurturing developers, which will enhance innovation and competitiveness in the UAE and the broader region.

Commitment to safe and responsible AI

Brad Smith of Microsoft highlighted the partnership’s broader scope, which extends beyond the UAE to underserved nations, combining leading technology with stringent standards for safe, trusted and responsible AI. This collaboration will align closely with government regulations in the UAE and the US.

Intergovernmental assurance and compliance

The partnership is supported by a unique Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement (IGAA) developed in consultation with UAE and US governments. This agreement sets world-class best practices for secure, trusted and responsible AI development and deployment. Both companies commit to adhering to US and international regulations concerning trade, security, responsible AI and business integrity.

Peng Xiao, Group CEO of G42, noted that Microsoft’s strategic investment will significantly enhance their international market presence by combining G42’s AI capabilities with Microsoft’s robust global infrastructure. “Together, we are not only expanding our operational horizons but also setting new industry standards for innovation,” he said.

“Our investment in G42 stands as a testament to the thriving and dynamic tech landscape in the UAE and the broader region,” said Samer Abu-Ltaif, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and President, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. He added that Microsoft views the investment as a testament to the dynamic tech landscape in the UAE and surrounding regions. This strategic alliance is expected to spur innovation, accelerate economic growth and empower countries to advance their digital strategies by leveraging cloud and AI technologies.

Recent collaborative milestones

Over the past year, the collaboration between G42 and Microsoft has seen several key developments. These include plans to develop AI solutions tailored for the public sector and industry, introduce sovereign cloud offerings and leverage advanced AI capabilities on the Azure public cloud platform. In November 2023, Microsoft also announced the availability of G42’s Jais Arabic Large Language Model on the new Azure AI Cloud Model-as-a-Service offering, marking a significant milestone in their partnership.

Also read: 

• How Can Cities Manage Traffic Effectively with AI?
• NVIDIA Contributes to US$110 Million Initiative for AI Education in U.S.-Japan Partnership
• Samsung Galaxy AI Expands Language Support to Reach More Global Users

Header Image from Flickr 

Press release link: https://news.microsoft.com/2024/04/15/microsoft-invests-1-5-billion-in-abu-dhabis-g42-to-accelerate-ai-development-and-global-expansion/ 

The post Microsoft Invests US$1.5B in G42 to Boost Global AI and Cloud Technologies appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

Bluecat Paper Founder Kavya Madappa talks to Jumpstart about the need to adopt sustainable practices while making paper.

Kavya Madappa has been running a spa resort in Coorg, Karnataka, for nearly 12 years. This meant that she had to extensively use paper for printing brochures, cards, and billing for various purposes. The many trips to the printers further opened her eyes to the amount of chemicals that were used on these papers.

Furthermore, Madappa, who grew up around the rich, verdant forests of Coorg, loved trees and didn’t like the fact they had to be cut down to make paper. So, she decided to do something about it.

“I started speaking to a few people to find out how you could make paper in a clean, sustainable way,” Madappa tells Jumpstart. She found out that paper could be made from many other substances, even including cotton rags and cloth.

Wanting to know more, she then began talking to experts involved in making paper from such materials, took up courses in the field, and eventually set up her paper-making factory in Peenya in Bengaluru in 2017.

Today, Madappa’s startup, Bluecat Paper, offers over 600 products made from flax, cotton rags, lemongrass, mulberry, coconut husk, rice stubble, coffee husks, banana stumps, and even elephant excrement. The products include paper made from different materials, notebooks, journals, bags, gift wraps, coasters, calendars, and more.

The need to go sustainable

“You cut at least 3 billion trees a year just for paper. And, it takes eight to ten years for it to become a tree,” Madappa explains. “Meanwhile, when it is becoming a tree, you already have a system that is in that ecosystem of soil, birds, animals, and everything that lives there. When you destroy so many billion trees in a year, you’re definitely going to cause an impact.”

According to a 2015 report, 42% of global wood harvest goes into making paper. Since 1990, around 420 million hectares of forest have been lost globally through deforestation. Between 2015 and 2020, the annual rate of deforestation was estimated to be 10 million hectares.

Madappa says that cellulose is the main ingredient required to make paper. However, trees have only 40% cellulose. “So that means it’s not such a great candidate to make paper, to begin with,” she says.

In contrast, lemongrass or cotton have about 80 to 95% cellulose, making them a better choice for paper. Since its inception, Madappa claims that her startup has saved around 30,000 trees.

The paper and pulp industry is not only contributing to deforestation but is one of the heaviest users of freshwater. It takes around 10 to 20 liters of water to make one A4 sheet of paper and hence, the process of making paper is estimated to use more water to produce one ton of product than any other industry.

Additionally, Madappa says that the conventional paper is made using around 80 chemicals, which are extremely toxic to the environment when they are discharged into waterways. The presence of chemicals also makes them unfit for recycling.

“When you’re making paper with trees, because of the chemicals, the water becomes black. Even though you recycle it, you won’t get clear [water],” Madappa explains. “All the paper in the world is made white, after which they add the dyes and make it colored. So they always make the base white. [Hence], they have to discard a lot of water.”

Bluecat Paper solves this issue in two ways: one, they avoid the use of any chemicals, which makes their paper and process clean. Second, they have an Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) on their factory premises, which recycles water and is reused in production. In this way, they save around 30,000 liters of water per day.

Furthermore, Madappa says that the conventional paper sometimes takes up to a year to decompose. Whereas Bluecat’s paper hardly takes three to four days to decompose, she claims. Meanwhile, as Bluecat’s papers are handmade, producing them consumes less power, whereas the conventional paper and pulp industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy.

Making sustainable paper

“As I studied about paper making, I got to know that you can make it from so much waste – you can make it from lemongrass waste, rice stubble, coffee, and tea husks,” Madappa says. “When you already have so much waste around that can make the same paper, you don’t need to cut trees to make paper anymore.”

Once Madappa understood this, she didn’t want to make it on a small scale; she wanted to make a difference. She then invested in the necessary equipment and machinery and started testing it. Many trials and errors followed.

All papers at Bluecat are handmade using the age-old paper-making process. First, the rags are chopped and put in beaters to make a pulp, which is then used to make the paper. If the raw material is fiber, it is first washed and cooked. Once cooked, it is rinsed again before making the pulp. In the case of using elephant excrement fiber, it is cleaned and disinfected before cooking.

“It’s not really rocket science to make paper. But it’s an absolute joy to get strong, thin sheets of paper,” Madappa says.

Every month, Bluecat sources around 20,000 kg of agro and industrial waste from farmers in and around the factory’s vicinity. Coffee husk is sourced from estates in Coorg, and elephant excrement comes from the Dubare elephant camp.

However, Madappa says that sustainability and being handmade comes with a price.

“The mill-made paper has been around for nearly 300 years. It’s made in large volumes and even the technology of the printers [is such that] they support the paper that is smooth and chemically filled up,” she says. She adds that large-scale adoption of sustainable paper will take time.

This incompatibility with conventional printers was one of the major challenges for Bluecat. When the paper is made from fiber, it has a certain texture to it. As a result, when it goes through a printer, sometimes it gets jammed. “So, now we’ve learned how to smoothen the paper out a little bit more by applying some extra pressure [to it],” Madappa explains.

While this is not ideal, the team at Bluecat is constantly innovating and testing new processes, like soaking the fibers for an extra hour. They are also talking to scientists to find out how this can be made easier.

“The most important thing is that you really have to believe in the fact that it will work,” Madappa says. “I already had a spa resort and we had people who wanted me to start another resort somewhere else. To say no to all that and to do something just because you believe it will make a difference.”

Around three years into the business, Madappa says that they are inching closer to breakeven. Currently, the team is experimenting with equipment that can make paper up to 30% faster, which she says can help bring down the cost of the paper.

Additionally, Madappa notes that while Bluecat’s customer base has increased in the last couple of years, Bluecat can only make a great impact if investments pour in from big corporates.

“This has not been an easy journey. But it’s been a rewarding one,” she says. “When more people get to know about it, we hope that they will choose to go tree-free with the paper.”

Images courtesy of Bluecat Paper

The post You’ve Heard of Plant-Based Meat – Get Ready for Tree-Free Paper appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

Blue Tribe Foods Co-founder Nikki Arora Singh talks to Jumpstart about the startup’s plant-based meat products, the market in India, and why these products are important for sustainability.

Every second, one to two acres of rainforests are cleared for animal rearing and agriculture. Along with deforestation, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of all human greenhouse gas emissions annually. Growing awareness around the environmental costs of animal husbandry and the meat industry has led plant-based meat startups to surge on a tidal wave of popularity.

Demand for sustainable meat options is growing for good reason. Livestock farming uses huge amounts of water. 92% of freshwater is used in farming, with one-third of it used for rearing livestock and manufacturing animal products.

The global demand for beef and other ruminant meats is expected to grow by 88% between 2010 and 2050. According to the World Economic Forum, meeting this demand would require pasturelands larger than the size of India. The extensive deforestation required to clear this pastureland, combined with the emissions from the animals themselves, would further aggravate the climate crisis.

As a solution to this crisis, several startups across the globe have been working on plant- and cell-based meat products. In December last year, Singapore became the world’s first country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat.

According to Statista, the global market value of plant based-meat is expected to reach around US$35.5 billion in 2027, compared to $11.1 billion in 2019. Meanwhile in India, the meat substitutes market is expected to reach over $47.57 million by the end of the fiscal year 2026.

“The real issue facing our environment right now is that everyone thinks it’s someone else’s problem to solve,” Nikki Arora Singh, Co-founder of Blue Tribe Foods, tells Jumpstart. “With a growing child, we see the real-time issues. So me and my husband, fortunately, decided that we aren’t the people who want to just see, but actually act on it.”

Blue Tribe Foods is a Mumbai-based alt-meat startup that provides plant-based alternatives to meat. Singh, along with her husband Sandeep, set up the venture last year “to bring in a completely new era and new thought on food in India.”

“We know that industrial-scale animal farming is unsustainable. We want to leave a better world for not just our daughter but for the next generation,” Singh says.

Why is plant-based meat important to sustainability?

“Meat consumption in its present form is harmful to the planet – and hence to humans – for more than just ethical reasons,” Singh says. “Be it greenhouse gas contributions, forested land which will need to be converted to pasture, zoonotic diseases, or even the use of steroid and antibiotics in animals – the science against animal-based meat consumption is for real.”

“While animal meat or dairy consumption may have been important from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s no longer relevant,” she says, adding that we can replicate the taste and the nutrient profile of animal meat through plant-based sources.

This, she adds, requires only a fraction of the resources of animal meat. “It tastes, feels, and cooks the same and is a whole lot better for the environment and for us,” she says.

Elaborating on the health benefits of plant-based meat, Singh says that all plant-based products are completely cholesterol-free, as cholesterol only comes from animal sources. The products from Blue Tribe Foods, for instance, offer the same nutritional value in terms of protein as the animal counterparts, but sans the steroids and antibiotics.

Setting up Blue Tribe Foods

Around one and a half years ago, Singh’s husband visited the Good Food Institute (GFI), an international nonprofit organization that promotes plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy, and eggs, in California. The experience was an eye-opener for him.

Seeing potential in India for plant-based meat, the duo began researching the products they could introduce into the market. At its core, their aim was to make products that look, feel, taste, and cook exactly like animal meat.

As opposed to the Western meat market, where beef is the most-consumed meat, chicken takes the top spot in India. As a result, Blue Tribe decided to start off with plant-based chicken meat alternatives.

In November last year, they soft-launched Blue Tribe Foods with plant-based chicken nuggets. Recently, they also launched plant-based chicken keema or minced chicken, a versatile product that can be used in a variety of Indian as well as international dishes. Sausages, kebabs, and, burger patties are next in the pipeline.

To date, Blue Tribe has expanded to six cities – Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Hyderabad – and plans to be in ten cities by April. Financially, the company is almost at break even.

“With the launch of keema now we are doubling [revenues] every month and hopefully that should continue as we add more products to our catalog,” Singh says.

Initially a jewelry designer, Singh launched her brand, Nikki Arora Fine Jewellery, in 2013. However, after having a child, she had to put the venture on hold. Then Blue Tribe came along.

“[Blue Tribe] is more like a baby to me,” Singh says. “After my daughter, we realized that this is more important – how we could do something better for the world.”

How plant-based chicken is made

Over the past year and a half, the team has been building their expertise in the plant-based meat space from scratch. Currently, they have a fully functional in-house R&D lab. The R&D team works closely with Nirvaan Thacker, their consultant chef, who has worked for multiple restaurants and hotels in the last few years.

“The products we make [are] reverse engineered,” Singh explains. “We take the product we want to replicate, say chicken nuggets, and then try to figure out which plant protein can give the same kind of texture and mouth feel and then flavor it to make it taste exactly like chicken.”

While the nuggets are made from proteins extracted from soy and peas, the mince is extracted from soy. Additionally, the sausages they are planning to launch will be completely extracted from pea protein.

Target consumers in India

“Non-vegetarians with a conscience” is how Singh defines their target consumers. “We want to appeal to non-vegetarians to reduce their meat consumption and replace it with plant-based sources. And definitely, vegans are welcome,” she says.

Singh adds that India’s huge population makes it a large meat market and hence, a potentially large plant-based meat market. However, India still has a long way to go in terms of awareness about the impact of animal agriculture. But Singh believes that there has been a positive change in that direction.

“As a community, we are becoming more and more aware of what we eat, and the recent pandemic has hastened that process,” she says. “This collective consciousness needs to grow exponentially if we are to create a positive impact for ourselves and for the little blue planet we call home.”

Singh claims that their first product, plant-based chicken nuggets, was a huge hit with consumers, who couldn’t tell the difference between real chicken and its plant-based alternative.

While the founders of Blue Tribe knew what they wanted to achieve from the onset, the journey behind getting the products to the market has been intense, Singh recalls.

“Right from getting a team in place, figuring out raw material suppliers – not just domestically but internationally – to create a fantastic product, to getting the right partnerships in place for manufacturing and distribution, it was challenging,” she says.

Going forward, the challenge of convincing a majority of the population that meat in its present form is bad for humans and the planet, is yet to come.

“For food lovers too, you’re kind of making a difference in each person’s views,” she says. “Hopefully, we could get to that mindset where people actually turn into vegan or vegetarians and still enjoy the chicken or meat [flavors through] plant-based food.”

Images courtesy of Blue Tribe Foods

The post Blue Tribe Foods: Helping Planet and People with Plant-Based Meat appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

At the age of 18, most people are busy making plans for their future and worrying about college assignments. But not Rachel Carrasco. She was balancing college and working as a marketing assistant for an events company run by her friends.

Getting a taste of the world of employment early, Carrasco believed in the merit of actual experience and dropped out of college. She continued to work in brands and advertising agencies till she was 24. But she realized she wanted more from life – she wanted to do something different.

“I just wasn’t sure what that was at the time. And I wanted to see the world,” says Carrasco. So she moved from the Philippines to Singapore. She started working her way up from scratch and worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), and Kimberly Clark until she founded her first company, Rache, in 2017.

Rache initially started off as a marketing consultancy for luxury and lifestyle brands, leveraging Carrasco’s extensive experience in the field. The startup handled customer relationship management and brand campaigns, but Carrasco wanted the company to sell experiences, not just products. To that end, she rebranded and pivoted the company.

Apart from offering experiences, Carrasco also aims to make Rache an advocacy platform for women’s empowerment and mental health. She specifically focuses her attention on encouraging women to support other women – largely because of one pivotal incident in her career.

While Carrasco was working at The Royal Bank of Scotland, she was recommended for promotion from an Executive Assistant to a Business Manager. But the recommendation did not sit well with her female colleagues.

“[The promotion] was turned down because the rest of the Executive Assistants that were all female, because they were there in the bank for far longer, they blocked it. And I really thought that was very nasty,” says Carrasco.

She recounted another similar experience with women at a different organization.

“I had a female boss and I was struggling with bits and pieces of this role. And instead of helping me, she throws me under the bus,” says Carrasco. “So I actually had a chat with her because I was like, ‘How could you have not just told me and how could you have not just spoken to me?'” The incident led her to resign from her position.

“It’s not so much female versus male. I actually think it’s female versus female,” says Carrasco. In fact, she says that most of the people who have criticized or scrutinized her way of thinking have been women.

“I’m not saying that all women are like this, but I just feel that in the workplace, women need to be able to help other women in general,” she says

Wearing many hats

Carrasco says she always wanted to own and run a business, ever since her childhood in the Philippines.

“Growing up in the Philippines, the culture itself, you know, it just pushes you to make something of yourself. And my grandparents, my mom, they all ran their own businesses. I think that was innate, growing up,” says Carrasco.

Besides, Carrasco was never one who liked being told what to do – something to be expected to some extent in every job.

“I just never really liked being told what to do in general. And I think that was as a daughter, as a friend, as an employee, or even in my other personal relationships – it made me feel confined and restricted,” says Carrasco. This led her to change jobs frequently, almost every three to four years, she adds.

While she was working in the corporate world, Carrasco often told her colleagues that she would start her own company one day, although she had no idea what it would be. And then one of these colleagues confronted her and gave her the push to start out on her own.

Although Carrasco deeply desired to be an entrepreneur, taking the first step did not come easy. She experienced the same fear that keeps most aspiring entrepreneurs stuck to their desks – the fear of leaving the security of a steady job.

“I was scared because I was like, ‘I’m in a job! I have to leave my job? And then I have to run my own company. So, like, how does that work?'” Carrasco says.

As an interim measure, Carrasco kept her her full-time job while launching her company, until she started getting more clients. To date, Rache has worked with notable clients including Diageo, LMVH, American Express, and TWG Tea.

Once Carrasco developed a taste for entrepreneurship, she picked up pace. She is currently working on launching a line of bacon snacks and confectionery called Baken in Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Taiwan, and Australia. The brand is scheduled to launch in Q2 2021.

Besides Baken, Carrasco is also working to introduce a ready-to-drink canned cocktail brand, RIO, to the Philippines this month. The serial entrepreneur says she also has other food and beverage brand concepts in the works and plans to launch a group of companies by the end of next year.

“They always say that the beginning is always the hardest. So I think I’m constantly saying to myself, ‘Oh my God, is this gonna work?'” says Carrasco. “But you just stick it through. That’s why I do multiple things at the same time. Eventually all of them will work, or one of them will.”

Image courtesy of Rachel Carrasco

The post Founder Since Birth: An interview with Rache Founder Rachel Carrasco appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

India is in the midst of a health tech boom. Alekhya Boora talks to Jumpstart about how she, along with her co-founder, built their healthtech company Ripsey in the face of this opportunity.

A few years ago, the definitive face of the healthtech industry in India was telemedicine platform Practo. Few, if any, had access to personal health management, fitness tracking, diagnostics and medicine delivery via online platforms, and the like.

Today, however, the industry looks very different. In mobile-first India, where 3G and 4G rates are the lowest in the world, users have access to an app for everything from fitness and nutrition, to health management, menstruation, and mindfulness.

A PwC report points out some startling statistics to put India’s healthcare system in context. A third of India’s population does not have access to primary healthcare, and 70% of healthcare infrastructure in the country is restricted to just the top 20 cities. Further, India has just one doctor for every 1000 people.

The report highlights another data point of interest – India is ranked among the top five countries for search engine results related to ‘mobile health,’ ‘health apps,’ ‘medical apps,’ and ‘mHealth.’ Health apps can help to bring down costs and increase access to healthcare providers, and as Alekhya Boora explains, the growth of this trend is already well under way.

India’s healthcare crisis breeds opportunity for health apps

Boora is the Co-founder of personal health management app Ripsey. She explains that the focus on preventative healthcare, which boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, has increased significantly enough for the healthtech industry to take note.

“If you look at the demographics, and the kind of disease maps that we have in India, over 51% of population is either diagnosed already or at a higher risk for lifestyle diseases,” she says. “A lot of times it’s easy to prevent something from happening, and most people are actually understanding this way better than they did two years ago.”

This increasing attention to managing one’s health proactively has built up the market for health apps in India.

Healthcare apps, valued at INR 27 billion in 2018, were expected to grow at 31.6% until 2024, which in itself is a steep growth rate. Come national lockdowns, there was a spike in the usage of health and fitness mobile apps in the very first week. Worldwide, the number of medical apps downloaded grew by 65% after the onset of the pandemic. In India, it grew by 90%, second only to South Korea.

That lifestyle diseases have been on a rising trend in India over the past year only makes a stronger case for app-based health management in India. Ripsey is placing its bets.

Getting started with Ripsey

Ripsey is a personalized health management app that aims to help users manage their lifestyle and existing or potential lifestyle diseases. The app uses user information, knowledge engineering, adaptive logic, and AI to provide personalized health plans to users based on factors related to their lifestyle, health, diagnostic profiles, and external environment.

The company was incorporated in 2018 with Boora and second-time entrepreneur Silky Singh as co-founders. An experience with a uterine growth prompted Singh to start Ripsey. Boora, who was previously with a New York investment bank, returned to India to do some soul-searching around the same time.

“It was a total happenstance for both of us. She was looking for a co-founder, I was just networking,” Boora says. Singh took to Boora, and Boora found herself relating to Ripsey’s mission. The two women started to consider the possibility of working together.

Seeing that their skill sets complemented each other’s, they decided to give it a month and gauge the potential of a partnership. It only took them a week, however, to realize that their relationship would work. Boora then officially joined Ripsey.

Building the app

Singh kickstarted the prototyping process soon after founding the company. Data insights from 30,000 surveys, along with the founders’ personal health experiences, were utilized to build Ripsey’s model.

One of the most important insights they gleaned through this process was a better understanding of people’s perception of weight and weight loss.

“The way people understand diet is very linear. What they fail to understand is your body is much more complex. You can’t pick the things that you want to address and forget about the remaining body that exists,” Boora says.

In its prototype days, Ripsey helped users with sustainable, healthier ways of managing their weight and health. The model focused on tracking users’ health metrics, planning a personalized nutrition and workout regime, and delivering meals to users daily.

However, localization and cultural context needed to play a role in order for the app to be successful. Many Indians, for instance, only consume meat on specific days of the week, may follow a vegetarian diet, or can be extremely selective in their choice of protein depending on their cultural context and personal preference.

This is the kind of complexity that Ripsey’s technology wants to address for its customers, so all its users can have a seamless experience of managing their lifestyle through the app, Boora says.

“Managing a disease should not be as tough as the disease itself… so the two pieces that we worked on were convenience and personalization,” she adds.

Ripsey currently focuses on clinical health, and has included diagnostics and a variety of health tracking options on the app so far, with plans to launch more features. The app recently launched on both Google Play and App Store.

Where there’s a woman founder, there’s bias

As a founder, Boora has found the journey so far to be  “equal parts frustrating and exciting.” Having to repeatedly go back to the drawing board can be an exasperating process. But the process of watching Ripsey users transition from being skeptical about the app to embracing it has been invigorating, she says.

This is very typical of what founders experience in the process of building a company, with the exception of one roadblock – gender bias. On being asked if there’s gender bias within the startup community, Boora responds with an unwavering yes.

“I think it’s largely because of the financial gap between a man and a woman, that’s probably why the investor community is largely men. It’s not like they’re ridiculing us, they actually feel that they’re giving us advice,” she says.

Overall, it can take anywhere between 100 years to 257 years to close global gender gaps across different streams of activity, according to the World Economic Forum. In 2018, women founders earned 78% for every dollar invested, whereas men made only 31%. Despite this telling metric, barely 3% of VC investment in 2019 went to companies with women founders.

Boora goes on to explain what this bias looks like in practice. From facing doubts about why two women were building a company, to being asked about plans for children, to being questioned about how marriage would affect the startup they were running as single women, various aspects of her identity have been picked apart in conversations that were meant to be about her startup.

For women founders, however, giving up doesn’t just mean losing your startup. It means succumbing to the systemic sexism that has hounded the founders before them, and allowing it to continue to plague women who choose to enter the industry after them.

As a self-styled data person, Boora has a close affinity with numbers. So it comes as no surprise when she says that the way to beat the bias is through numbers. The industry needs more founders, more women in business, more professionals, and more women on boards, she says.

“If there’s ten people in a meeting, five of them are women, your voice will be louder. It’s just a numbers game.”

The post How She Did It: Building A Healthtech Company in India appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

Hong Kong-based seasoned banker and investor Jennifer Cao talks to Jumpstart about the financial inclusion of women in Asia, and how supporting women in business can be part of the answer.

The fintech space is thriving in Asia, from wealth management and trade financing, to buy-now-pay-later and digital payments, which all owe their growth to limited and ineffective traditional banking systems in the region. Even as fintechs continue trying to fill financing gaps, the truth is that the burden of financial exclusion falls disproportionately on marginalized groups. One of these is women.

Consumer adoption of fintech has grown 2-3X in the APAC region between 2018 and 2020, according to EY. Although China and India are leading markets, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea are not far behind. Fintech options for businesses are opening up in the region as well.

Further, while over half of the world’s 80 fintech unicorns are in the Americas, the rest are almost evenly split between the EMEA and APAC regions. Of the total funding amount raised by fintech startups over the years, which reached US$121.7 billion in February 2020, Asian firms emerged as the leaders of the pack, raising over 40% of this amount.

One of the reasons behind this boom is that Asia is an underserved market. Emerging Southeast Asian countries also have some of the most underbanked populations in the region. As of 2019, over 70% of adults in Southeast Asia are either underbanked or unbanked.

The problem is not limited to Southeast Asia alone. Per a 2017 report, both East APAC and South Asia had high unbanked populations. Overall, just about 27% adults in Asia had a bank account, and only 33% of firms had access to a loan or line of credit as of 2018.

Asia is grappling with the financial exclusion of millions, but women pay a higher price.

Financial inclusion, or the lack of it, is not a homogenous trend in the APAC region. Asia’s unbanked population is largely found in China, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Of these, women account for 60% of the financially excluded in India and China, and 65% in Bangladesh, versus a global average of 56%.

The problem starts with how traditional banks segment their customers, Jennifer Cao explains. Cao is a Hong Kong-based banker with over 25 years of financial services experience, about half of which she spent in Asia. She explains that in traditional personal banking, customers are segmented into different buckets based on demographic factors including their wealth.

“If you are a stay at home mom who wants to start your own business, you don’t really belong to any of these traditional segments,” she says. “What banks need is to attract assets and to lend money. But banks cannot do the credit risk analysis of someone they don’t have a relationship with. So the old traditional model cannot reach these people, and the cost-benefit for a traditional model just doesn’t incentivize big banks to go and serve this below-mass segment.”

Even in the startup space, Cao notes, the focus is often on fintechs that can achieve an exponential growth trajectory. Building more inclusive solutions may not feature high on the list of priorities in the race to capture market share.

It’s not that founders don’t want to focus on marginalized groups such as women, but that they haven’t quite figured out how to make inclusivity profitable and ‘sexy’ enough to attract investors and partners.

This can be problematic in several ways. Financial inclusion is conducive to improving livelihoods, reducing poverty and inequality, promoting entrepreneurship, and driving inclusive economic development, a working paper by the International Monetary Fund notes. In the APAC region, where informal finance is extensively available (leading to predatory interest rates and even threat to one’s person and property), this has further significance.

In other words, being excluded from access to affordable financial services means that women become heavily dependent on their financial providers, face inequalities in different spheres of their lives, and are not counted as productive members of society. The lack of access to savings, credit, and insurance solutions impedes women’s “financial resilience and stability.”

Financial illiteracy is problematic too.

Being financially excluded is not only about the lack of availability of financial products and services. It also means not knowing how to plan one’s own finances, or how to tap into financial products and services where they are available.

For instance, in Southeast Asia, while the average income for women has doubled since the late 1990s, their financial knowledge and decision-making remains more or less unchanged. So even if women have money in hand, they may not be able to leverage ways to make that money productive. Cao cites her own observations in this respect.

“Even the high earners in the international women’s community in Hong Kong don’t have the necessary financial knowledge to manage their own investments, or to have financial planning for retirement  or have proper protection. Many of them default to their partners, even though they are also earners,” she says.

Cao adds that it’s important for financial literacy to find a place into education systems. Financial planning and security is a foundational aspect of living and thriving in these times, she explains, so even people from non-financial backgrounds need to have a grasp on the basics.

“You need to know where money comes from, where does money go, how does money grow, what are the emotional attachments to money, and how do I have a healthy relationship with money. This needs to be in the education system. My high school- and college-aged kids, who are learning about science, literature and history, should also learn about this as well,” she says.

Putting expertise and passion to good use.

As someone who supports the mission to financially empower women, one of her more recent undertakings includes participating in a pre-seed female investor-driven round in Singapore-based women-focused neobank Lucy.

Lucy’s mission is to “provide financial services to as many women as possible,” the company says on its website. The app, which is to be launched this year in Singapore, offers free accounts that come with debit cards, no-interest salary advances, loan management services, and flexible credit, among other features. The bank also does not take fees from its account-holders.

On the question of whether there’s a business opportunity in a solution like Lucy, Cao notes that the sheer number of women who need access to financial services for a variety of reasons – financing, payments, forex, financial management – means that the opportunity is very much present. The approach however, needs to be carefully managed in order to balance the problem-solution aspect with the company’s mission.

“If Lucy creates a beautiful app and charges a 30% fee, what’s the point? But then you have VCs saying that if you don’t charge 30%, you’re not going to be profitable enough, so the viable way is to grow in numbers,” Cao says.

“[That’s why] we need everybody to be promoting something like that, a company that has a mission. It’s not profit-driven only. Businesses that do good should be the way to go for the future,” she adds.

Moreover, she adds that the money trail is where the real talk is. Women-driven businesses need backing. Cao firmly believes that one way to balance the scales is to direct capital to women-run businesses, women founders, women venture capital partners, and women business leaders.

Lucy’s own website quotes several media sources to point out that women founders secure barely 3% of the funding that men receive, despite the fact that gender parity in entrepreneurship could give the global economy a $5 trillion boost, and that women founders are able to generate twice the average returns per dollar of funding.

But beyond the numbers, it’s truly about the community. Historical movements take place among congregations of people with shared beliefs. And while it can be easy to co-opt these movements (think poorly-thought-out Women’s Day campaigns), the true driving force of change is ultimately a community that supports each other.

As Cao says, “Businesses need to be on the right side of history and society.” In the brewing commercial reckoning coming for business leaders everywhere, companies need to become inclusive for all groups of people, including women – and in a society hinged on economic activity, this goes for finance more than anything.

The post Asia Has a Financial Inclusion Problem, and It’s Especially Bad for Women appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.

Founder of Creative Galileo Prerna Jhunjhunwala talks about how Creative Galileo brings together the best of education and entertainment and what the future of education holds.

When Prerna Jhunjhunwala was young, she traveled across India extensively. As her father had textile plants in parts of Orissa, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh, her holidays were largely spent in those factories. Growing up, she thus spent a substantial amount of time with the workers there – and with their children.

Jhunjhunwala, who grew up in Kolkata and Delhi, was quick to notice how these children in the small villages in remote parts of India were so talented, and yet had little to no access to education.

“The kid may be very talented, but there are no good preschools, no good primary schools,” she tells Jumpstart. “The government is still focusing on secondary school or higher education, but primary school and preschools continue to be a problem in India.”

Jhunjhunwala is the Founder of edtech startup Creative Galileo, and of Little Paddington Pre-school in Singapore. It was her firsthand experience of the stark reality of education in India that led her to start both her ventures.

According to data from UNESCO, in 2019, only 62.8% of the population in India was enrolled for pre-primary education, while 96.83% was enrolled for primary education. Further, a recent study by UNESCO noted that while 41.2% of women in rural parts of India are not literate, only 20.4% have primary education.

Meanwhile, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2019) by Pratham, an NGO, only 16% of children aged between 4 and 8 years can read text at the prescribed level, while nearly 40% cannot even recognize letters. Additionally, in the 26 rural districts surveyed across 24 states, only 41% of the children could recognize two-digit numbers.

“I decided that I wanted to do something with education and something with making education available for all, especially in the foundational years,” she recalls, stressing that no matter the effort, children in grades six to ten won’t understand complex subjects until their foundations are strong.

“The point is to get the first bit correct – get the phonics of the child correct when it comes to languages, get the numbers correct, get the bases correct,” Jhunjhunwala adds.

Foraying into education with Little Paddington preschool

A graduate of NYU’s Stern School of Business, Jhunjhunwala began her entrepreneurial journey when she moved to Singapore. In 2015, she founded Little Paddington preschool there. The preschool focuses on each child’s individual needs through its project and inquiry-based learning methods.

As someone who is not a firm believer in traditional worksheet-based learning, Jhunjhunwala wanted to make learning more immersive and fun for the children, complete with hands-on activities.

“That’s when I started my first school. It was a small center with about 60 kids and only 10 teachers,” she recalls. “We managed to build a curriculum that is fun for the children with a lot of outdoor spaces and a lot of different ateliers.”

The curriculum included cookery, art, music, dancing, and more. Within the first six months, the center grew to 120 students. Having drawn such a positive response from parents, in the next four to five years, Jhunjhunwala scaled the venture from one to five preschools. Today, Little Paddington has a team of 140 educators and 600 students from 60 different nationalities across its schools in Singapore.

Creative Galileo brings together the best of education and entertainment

“Having worked in schools and founded five schools, […] I realized how to make learning fun for the children – what makes them go and what keeps them engaged. Having had that experience myself, I decided to bring it to an online platform,” Jhunjhunwala says.

Launched in July 2020, Creative Galileo, Jhunjhunwala’s offering to the ‘edutainment’ is an e-learning app that brings together the best of education and entertainment to create personalized learning experiences for children between three to eight years of age. It focuses on the six learning domains – numeracy, language, arts and aesthetics, social and emotional learning, motor skills, and discovery of the world through narrative videos, gamification, and personalized learning journeys.

In a shift from traditional teaching practices, the app teaches students through the characters of Little Singham, an Indian animated television series. It offers a range of research-based games and videos that are tailored to stimulate children’s brains, enabling them to be more responsive and helping them improve their reflexes. The app also focuses on inculcating values like friendship, kindness, helpfulness, and morality.

Jhunjhunwala started working on the app last year by purchasing various licenses to use Little Singham’s characters. She then worked to incorporate them into a syllabus.

“I combined the learning objectives and the learning journeys for the children, where these characters are taking them through their learning journeys,” she says. These characters help children to grasp the core concepts of what they’re being taught through engaging and playing with them.

She built the first proof of concept and launched the app in July, around the time when COVID-19 peaked. Within the next six months, Jhunjhunwala says, the app garnered a million downloads with no customer acquisition cost, in large part due to the use of the beloved children’s cartoon.

“It is your favorite character Little Singham and you’re learning maths with him and he’s asking, ‘What is one plus one? Oh maybe you got it wrong,’ versus simply doing it on a worksheet. So obviously, kids are going to enjoy it a lot more,” she says.

While their focus was on India at the time of the launch, they soon realized that problems with pre-primary education were not India’s burdens alone. Education systems across the Indian subcontinent, which includes Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh, are also subject to similar issues. Soon, Creative Galileo started seeing downloads from these regions as well.

Without any marketing, Pakistan accounted for 2.5% of the downloads, while 2.6% came from Nepal, and 1% from Bangladesh, Jhunjhunwala says.

“We started to realize that these countries don’t have such characters and such platforms on their own – they rely on a platform like ours,” she adds.

The app currently has over 210,000 kids who are monthly active users, and has crossed about 1.2 million downloads. Although the app is still at a proof of concept stage, almost 42% of users are coming back for a second or third session.

What sets Creative Galileo apart

“There is no other character-based app [in India], at least that I know of today, that brings together a universe of characters for children to engage with. That is the first thing that makes it really fun,” Jhunjhunwala says.

Additionally, the app, which is currently free, provides personalized learning journeys. Explaining this, Jhunjhunwala says, “If your child is not doing particularly well in subtraction, our app will actually be able to understand that and will be able to advise revision modules that the child should be doing to ensure that the child picks up the skill set.”

The app, which is designed to be child and parent-friendly, has an easy onboarding process which allows the user to immediately play the games or watch the videos. For parents, it has a parent zone, where they can select specific topics for their children to focus on, such as spelling or math. This zone also closely tracks the child’s progress and shares it with the parents.

The makers also tweaked the app to ensure that it is easy for Creative Galileo’s target audience to use. Though Internet penetration and data connectivity are on a steep rise in India, people in Tier II, III, and IV cities are unlikely to be carrying advanced and powerful smartphones.

“We managed to bring our app size down to 10 MB, which is way lower than our peers – which stand at 80 or 100 MB – so that the children can actually download the app, even if the Internet is choppy, even if they have lagging Internet, or even if they don’t have the best handset,” she adds.

What lies ahead

At the peak of COVID-19, nearly 1.6 billion students in 200 countries were affected by school closures. As classes moved online, the pandemic thus accelerated the adoption of technology in education. Jhunjhunwala says that this trend is here to stay.

“[I don’t think] the future of the world is going to ever be any more a completely offline channel of learning,” she says, adding that even after the pandemic, when things normalize, there will be adoption of a blend of offline and online learning.

As more technology and content becomes available to children, there will be more engagement, she adds. “This gamification of learning will make the entire process of learning more immersive for the children. And that is why I think learning through this medium will also be more impactful for them.”

Jhunjhunwala cites international examples of edutainment content like Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, saying that there is much happening in this space internationally.

“I think it’s time that India did [edutainment] too […] and essentially, by extension, the entire ASEAN region will do very well with a platform like this,” she adds.

Furthermore, in a populous country like India, where there is a shortage of teachers, innovation will play a key role in providing real time update to the parents regarding whether a child has understood the concept or have mastered a particular topic, Jhunjhunwala says.

Meanwhile, riding high on the wave of e-learning, Jhunjhunwala is focusing on adding about 100 hours of content to Creative Galileo, improving the tech, and adding new characters. As soon as the tech side of the platform is complete, which will take another eight months to 12 months, the app focus on introducing new language versions to broaden its reach.

“The idea is to keep on adding to this universe and make the platform completely language agnostic. So that in time to come, we can change this entire platform to a Bangla or to an Urdu or a Hindi [platform] without changing the user experience at all,” Jhunjhunwala says. “Then eventually, we would like to cover the global markets by going vernacular, and also adding new international characters to our platform.”

These are lofty goals, and Jhunjhunwala’s team has a lot of work ahead of them to achieve their ends. However, she says her passion for the job, and the sense of common purpose within her team, makes the challenges less stressful.

“I enjoy it so much that any difficulty that comes into the picture, it’s not really a challenge. All of us [huddle] together as a team and [solve] it and, it’s a factor that we are working together to achieve something better,” she adds. “So I don’t think we’ve ever taken any kind of issue as a challenge. We take everything as an opportunity.”

Images courtesy of Prerna Jhunjhunwala.

Header image courtesy of Tina Floersch on Unsplash.

The post Creative Galileo is Ushering in a New Dawn in Asia’s Edutainment Market appeared first on Jumpstart Magazine.