Our Investment in Asepha — Fellow Fund

We are excited to welcome Asepha into the Ripple Ventures Fellow Fund portfolio as our third fellow fund investment alongside Artemis and WaiveTheWait! As a reminder, the Fellow Fund invests in diverse-led student/first-time founders building in enterprise and developer tooling as an extension of the RippleX Fellowship mission.

Asepha is building an AI-enabled clinical decision support (CDS) tool, leveraging disparate datasets of research, trials, and healthcare data mapped through their own LLM to help healthcare professionals provide better care. We led their pre-seed round alongside our friends at Techstars Toronto and NEXT Canada.

Check out their website and demo to learn more.

The Opportunity

Market

In Canada alone, healthcare professionals currently spend 19% of their time reading clinical documents, amounting to 55.2 million hours each year. This substantial commitment translates to a staggering $3.2 billion spent solely on reading, which could otherwise be utilized to care for an additional 16.4 million patients. Unfortunately, the existing healthcare system lacks the scalability to accommodate the increasing patient load.

Asepha’s intervention seeks to break down this barrier by offering support to pharmacists and physicians, enabling them to efficiently care for a greater number of patients.

Asepha’s Approach

Asepha’s AI-driven platform utilizes a proprietary algorithm, employing multi-dimensional, context-based analysis to process extensive patient-specific data sourced from trusted medical databases. Through their proprietary data ingestion and indexing process, their AI model parses millions of medical documents and emulates the logic behind clinical decision-making. By doing so, Asepha delivers precise and relevant information to healthcare professionals, empowering them to make well-informed decisions more efficiently.

Asepha envisions a future where pharmacists and healthcare professionals are equipped with AI-powered tools that are timely, precise, and relevant. These tools aim to significantly decrease the time spent on information retrieval and case workup. Ultimately, Asepha aims to become the leading data platform for healthcare information.

Team

• Eunice Wu (Co-Founder & CEO): University of British Columbia — Doctor of Pharmacy — PharmD (2023). Eunice is a member of NEXT 36’s 2023 cohort and co-founded Asepha in February 2023 with Can. She was a Pharmacy Assistant & Student at Shoppers Drug Mart for over 5 years and was featured on news outlets such as Global News and CTV News for her past work as a co-founder of a COVID-relief initiative. Alongside Can, Eunice will be joining Techstars Toronto’s Summer Class of 2023.
• Can Uncu (Co-Founder & CTO): University of Toronto — Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Gap Year). Can is also a member of NEXT 36’s 2023 cohort and co-founded Asepha in February 2023 alongside Eunice. He previously worked in engineering and product management roles at AMD and other early-stage tech startups.

About the Fellow Fund

At Ripple Ventures, we believe in backing the most daring founders building at the forefront of technology. We invest $25–75K through our fellow fund with the intention to back student or first-time founders at the earliest building stages, where we act as a first check and support founders from inception to growth.

Learn more about Ripple Ventures: https://www.rippleventures.com/

Learn more about our fellow fund: https://www.fellowship.rippleventures.com/fellowship-program

If you’re in the early stages of building in B2B SaaS, we’d love to get in touch. Connect with us by telling more about what you’re building here.