Futurize Spotlight: Fuel Africa startup launches medical software Vectorgram

Following the first cohort of Fuel Africa, an entrepreneurship program focused on building early-stage solutions in Healthcare, a team of young entrepreneurs used their learnings and ecosystem to launch Vectorgram, a scalable medical software for patient data management and software automation that make treatments more efficient.

In this interview, I sat down with Ian Omung’a, CEO of Vectorgram, to find out more about their journey, a major pivot in their product, and how programs like Fuel Africa can catalyze and inspire entrepreneurship across Africa.

Tell us about yourself and the team, how did you meet and decide to work together?

My name is Ian and I’m the CEO of Vectorgram. I’m a Machine Learning Engineer & CS Senior at The African Leadership University. My co-founders are Nikita, the CSO and Brian, the CTO. Brian and I met in high school, and we worked on a couple of projects together before Vectorgram. We met Nikita at Fuel Africa, the Healthcare Innovation program run by Futurize. After Vectorgram’s prototype won 2nd place in the program, we decided to lean in and build Vectorgram as a fully-fledged startup.

From left to right: Ian Omung’a, Nikita Muthuuri, Brian Mungai

What is your idea? How did you come up with it?

Vectorgram creates scalable medical software used in hospitals for patient data management and software automation that make treatments more efficient in terms of time, costs and patient outcomes. 

We started off building AI-powered diagnosis software to scale up breast cancer diagnosis in an efficient, more accurate way. However, when we started validating this on the ground, we discovered just how much need there was for software systems that could complement vital healthcare processes like cancer diagnosis in terms of data storage, data processing and automations for the medical workflows related to this data. This is why we shifted focus and started building a robust software infrastructure to address these needs. Vectorgram now solves these problems through Archive & Sequence, our record digitization and EHR products.

What (financial) support have you received until today? What are your plans for the next 12 months to scale your business and what do you need help with?

During the Fuel Africa hackathon, we were fortunate enough to be mentored by oncological experts from places as relevant as AstraZeneca and Microsoft. As one of Fuel Africa’s winning teams, we got access to critical first introductions with potential users of our product in the Kenyan healthcare space who were in Futurize’s network as well as an angel investment. 

In September, we got into the African Impact Initiative’s Incubator based in Toronto, Canada, giving us access to a $3000 USD angel investment as well as industry-specific mentorship from Healthcare operators & Founders from their global pool of partners. In the next 12 months, we plan to scale to serve the entirety of Kenya’s 52M patient base in enough healthcare facilities spanning all 47 counties nationally. To get here, we will need even more seed capital and strategic partnerships within the Kenyan healthcare ecosystem. 

How did Futurize support you on your journey? What would you recommend to students around the world looking to be entrepreneurs and trying out different business ideas? 

The mentorship within Futurize’s program and ecosystem has helped us iterate in the right direction and address the most pressing needs for Medical Imaging in Breast Cancer from an industry perspective. The initial relationships Futurize helped us establish later on in the Kenyan healthcare system as well as their $600 USD capital injection into our nascent startup were invaluable in fleshing out our prototype’s experiments at scale. Futurize’s support for Vectorgram helped us achieve enough initial momentum to complete the essential product development we needed to validate our ideas and get our product to our first set of users.

What inspires you?

The fact that the tech infrastructure we’re building for the African Healthcare ecosystem could completely change how 1.4 Billion people get access to healthcare when they need it. Creating these potentially life-saving solutions with a team that spans practical medical expertise as well as large-scale software systems design inspires a deep appreciation for how critical Vectorgram’s work is.

Why do we need more young entrepreneurs across Africa? 

Young African entrepreneurs are the critical catalysts for change that African systems have always needed to execute the science of progress but have never had enough of.

To find out more about Vectorgram, visit https://vectorgram.co/