Doubling Up On The #Worldpositive Prize
It has been a pleasure working with the Kairos team for the past few years to support their mission: empowering a network of young entrepreneurs working on the great challenges of our society. Sound familiar and world positive? We thought so too.
For the previous Kairos K50 Summit in 2015, we cooked up a way for Obvious Ventures to officially be involved — as a startup judge during the conference, and a sponsor of a $50K investment that we deemed the #worldpositive prize.
This was an investment in a company that best represented our focus: applying technology towards a systemic challenge in the world.
Fast forward to today (let’s not forget 2016’s winner), and we are back at it again. At last week’s Kairos K50 Summit 2017 in NYC we were blown away by the crowd of such talented, young (<25 years old) entrepreneurs working on big issues. We spent some extra time with a short list that included:
- Pavlov: Leveraging AI to help businesses automate their customer success process
- Synapse: Automated object recognition for x-ray imaging devices in security screens
- Sibly: The most effective 24/7 mental health professional in your pocket
- Neolight: Best-in-class tech for treating medical conditions in newborns
- Ranomics: Improving the understanding of human genetics through custom assay development
- Wasteless: Re-capturing $1B of lost grocery revenues and optimizing grocery sales
- Stord: Asset-Light 3rd party warehousing
The stakes had clearly been raised since the last event, with each company delivering polished and impressive presentations. Ultimately, after a tough deliberation, the #worldpositive prize went to: Neolight!
This Scottsdale-based company truly embodies what we get excited about at Obvious — leveraging deep technical expertise to address an important, but often hidden, problem.
Neolight is focused on developing low-cost hardware and novel software to improve infant care devices. Their first product is addressing infant jaundice, a condition that impacts 60% of newborns. Due to the high cost and low availability of light-treatment machines, millions of infants in America are not properly treated for jaundice and need to be readmitted to the hospital. Neolight is building an order-of-magnitude cheaper and yet more effective solution to this issue and are already in conversations with top provider networks. Icing on the cake: the founding team consists of three sharp engineers of varying disciplines.
We truly enjoyed meeting Vivek and Chase and look forward to remaining in touch as newly-minted, official investors in the company. Congratulations Neolight!
