Despite the impressive talent available in the region, only a few Latin American startups manage to stand out against innovative projects from around the world.
Precisely that feat was recently achieved by Salva Health, a Colombian startup that was chosen as the winner of the Startup Battlefield 2024 global competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, beating the more than 2,000 companies that applied and standing out among the 200 companies that were accepted.
Among the companies that have gone through Startup Battlefield are names like Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, Trello, Mint, among other companies that have collectively raised more than $29 billion in funding and more than 200 exits, evidencing the importance that Salva Health’s triumph represents for Latin American entrepreneurship.
Latin American entrepreneurship with global impact
Salva Health is an example that Latin American startups have everything to compete globally. However, behind this type of recognition there is a key factor why many startups in the region do not stand out successfully: the importance of believing deeply in what they are doing.
In an interview with Context, Valentina Agudelo, founder and CEO of Salva Health, said that “it is important to know that you have in your hands something that goes beyond you, and that you are the right person to open all the doors or at least knock on all the possible doors”.
Regarding this experience, the founder emphasizes that “although these are global competencies that usually seem relatively impossible, for us the field of the impossible is what we work in. Six years ago nobody would have believed that it would be possible to create a device like Julieta, so, in addition to believing it, it is about not resting until we know that we are making the best attempt to make possible this project with which we want to generate impact”.
That desire to make an impact stood out against projects from around the world. After being accepted into the Startup Battlefield 2024 competition, along with 199 other startups, Salva Health was chosen among the 20 semi-finalists, and after presenting its pitch was selected among the 5 finalists for a final presentation to the final panel of judges, which included Navin Chaddha (Mayfield), Chris Farmer (SignalFire), Dayna Grayson (Construct Capital), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate) and Hans Tung (Notable Capital).
At the end of the presentation and answering questions from the judges, Salva Health was chosen as the winner, beating out GeCKo Materials, Luna, MabLab and Stitch3D. In addition to the global recognition, the Colombian startup received $100,000 as a prize.
In 2023 the company had already stood out by winning its first competition, the XXII edition of the Global eAwards, organized by NTT DATA FOUNDATION, in which 17 countries and some 400 projects per country participated. This year, the initiative also stood out in the “Unlock Her Future”, where more than 900 projects applied.
A clear purpose: to save lives
The idea of Salva Health began to take shape six years ago as a theoretical university project formed at the time by Valentina Agudelo and her two best friends: Isabela and Cristina.
“We started researching cancer for this project, and we realized that mortality in mom’s cancer is almost ironic,” says Valentina. “Breast cancer has a survival rate above 95% when detected at an early stage. But at the same time it is the cancer that causes the most deaths among women in the world.”
With the goal of saving lives absolutely clear, the project got the backing of an insurance company to develop the research. “Six years later, we were able to build a device focused on underserved populations that can identify the risk of breast cancer. This is our first product, called Julieta,” says the founder.
This device developed by Salva Health is completely portable, allows the analysis of breast tissue and helps in the early detection of breast cancer. With AI technology it also helps to speed up diagnoses, a whole set of innovations to make early diagnosis accessible even to women in remote areas.
“The problem here is an operational issue and is the lack of access to diagnostic tests, which is not allowing early diagnosis and that is why mortality has increased,” says Agudelo.
The social impact is undoubtedly a large part of the success that the startup has had, solving a problem that, although global, its solution mainly impacts women who do not have access to timely diagnosis. “We think and develop a product for underserved populations, that is precisely what makes Salva Health’s work stand out.”
From research to reality
The company has a multidisciplinary team in which the potential of its talent and tenacity stand out to make this project a reality.
The CEO describes as the biggest learning for the company the importance of having the right allies from the very beginning, including talent, suppliers, sponsors and others. “We had a great advantage from the beginning, which was having a very dynamic team and having the backing of SURA, which is one of the largest insurers in Latin America, to develop all our research. That gave us peace of mind and the market the certainty that we were doing our process with correct research protocols and that we were developing a perfect device with precision indicators that were competitive in the market,” said Valentina. “That is only possible if we get the right people to help us, both our suppliers and our researchers, our collaborators, everyone in general, because we are in the same line of thinking and with the same purpose,” she concludes.
Although all the research was carried out in Colombia, the launch is being considered for Latin America. Salva Health expects that its first product will be available on the market in the next six months, and in addition to its allies already established in Colombia, the startup is currently in talks with potential clients in Mexico and Peru to carry out commercial pilots, while analyzing the issue and the regulatory strategy for expansion in order to achieve accelerated growth in the region.
In terms of financing, the company closed a pre-seed round earlier this year for US$750,000 from angel investors. In addition to this, the money raised in the three awards Salva Health has won amounts to $320,000 dollars in total, thus surpassing the million dollar barrier; which has served to accelerate the launch of the product.
In the TechCrunch competition the company opened a Seed round that will become the first formal round in which the startup is seeking Venture Capital, a round in which it expects to raise over $2M dollars.
Technology to break down barriers
When it comes to underserved populations and women in rural areas, access to timely diagnosis currently faces several barriers that put patients’ lives at risk. Juliet, the device developed by Salva Health, uses artificial intelligence systems to both run the test and read the test.
“We can’t rely on having a specialized radiologist who can run the test and then interpret it. Right now, our device is able to run the test autonomously, including validating connection errors, validating that the data is transferred successfully. And then, once the data is collected, the device also has the capacity to interpret it in order to identify those women who are at risk of breast cancer so that they can be attended to in the health system,” explains Valentina Agudelo.
Technological development is at a time when it is perfectly matched with the development of medical devices and this is what allows the devices to be simplified so that they can be used on a mass scale.
In this case, it is a solution that seeks to guarantee early diagnosis so that patients can receive the necessary treatment and thus reduce the number of breast cancer deaths.
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