 All right, well it is 11 a.m. here on the east coast and hello everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening or good morning depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you the latest in our 2017 webinar series on the topic of fighting Zika with technology and equity crowdfunding. My name is Yana Aranta and I am the president of Engineering for Change. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. The webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offering. Information on upcoming webinars in the series as well as archive videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinars web page as well as on our YouTube channel and also on our web page. Both of the URLs are listed here. If you have any questions, comments or recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar series team at webinars at Engineering for Change.org. 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In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type in your location and I'll go ahead and get us started by letting you all know where I am. I see we already have folks entering their feedback. So I'm here in Brooklyn. We already have someone here from Denver. Please feel free to enter your location into the chat. All of your questions should be reserved into the Q&A window, which is located immediately below the chat. I do see that folks are using the Q&A window to answer this question in particular, but do use the chat window. Thank you for joining us from Athens, Ohio, from Oregon, from Chicago, from on Island and all around the states. We'll see if we have anybody from around the world. The Q&A window should be used for questions, which are going to be a reserved for the presenters, and that way we'll be able to keep track of all those. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. As you may be aware, you should open our Spotify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your professional development hour, please follow the instructions on the top of the 50 professional development page after the presentation, and the link is listed here. All right. All the way up front is Hawaii. Thanks, everyone. Awesome. So, I'd like to take a moment to tell you a little bit about today's webinar and our presenter. For most social enterprises, especially for hardware-led social ventures, fundraising is one of the biggest challenges. The emerging practice of equity crowdfunding is best known for its capability to scale and bring products to market. Today, we are very pleased to be joined by Mike Worth, the CEO and co-founder of the Social Enterprise Matronova. Mike will share insights on how equity crowdfunding enables the development of Matronova's vector control technology solution in response to the threat of the Zika virus in 2016. And prior to Matronova, Mike has advised a socially conscious central fund on a global health strategy. She has also worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations Millennium Project, and is published in the field of maternal health policy and innovation. Mike really is a charge and innovative approach as to maternal newborn, child, and reproductive health, and we are so honored to have her join us to share her insights today. With us, I'm going to turn it over to Mike. Hi, Yana. Hello. Hi, Yana. Hi. Thank you so much for the introduction and for the opportunity to speak to this group. We're very excited here at Matronova to share our experience with our most recent proprietary innovation and in particular, to talk through the process and the promise of equity crowdfunding. Just give me one minute for the slide. Okay. There we go. Let me start by telling you a little bit about Matronova. We are a social enterprise with a global focus. Our mission is to accelerate the speed at which innovative technologies are adopted and distributed, particularly focused on the time of childbirth, which is a time of greatest risk for mother and newborn in many countries around the world, including the United States. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, the Twitter handle is at Matronova. I'll be telling you more about the textile product that is our latest innovation to fight Zika and that has its own Twitter handle and following. But I'd like to tell you a little bit about Matronova first. We are very pleased to have partnered for this project with America's and with Alessandra Gold. And we are funded, as you'll hear, through equity crowdfunding through a platform called Republic, which has become a tremendous partner of ours. And the initial grant as part of a Zika challenge came from Grand Challenges Canada through CAMTEC. So a lot of folks were involved in facilitating this process. And we really like to, you know, it's fun to talk about because it is so very different. The title of the seminar is a novel wearable solution. And those of you who are deep into the global health space will understand the pun there. Solution to fight mosquito borne illness and launch equity crowdfunding. So a couple of highlights about us. We are still a startup, but we do have some excellent traction behind us. We are a revenue generating company. We do a lot of our work through e-commerce. We focus, as I said, on maternal newborn devices and diagnostics. For the most part, the bread and butter of our work is on identifying, testing and then scaling access to what sounds like fairly typical products in the maternal and newborn health space. New kinds of incubators, new kinds of jaundice devices, new ways to stop postpartum hemorrhage. However, usually these are truly faster, better, cheaper, more rugged and very innovative products. I'll be able to tell you a little bit about them in a moment. But that's the bread and butter of what we do and you'll see why the Zika innovation is so different. And then finally, funding we've raised has been through angel investors and equity crowdfunding is the majority of it. It's my job to make it look easy. But I can tell you it's been a very long and up and down process and we're happy to be where we are today. So a little bit more we deliver innovative solutions for obstetric newborn and reproductive health in emerging markets via e-commerce. We're building a network of professionals, providers, decision makers, frontline health professionals who we reach through a list that we've developed in-house as well as through social media. What we tend to do is carve out or create through our own invention exclusive distribution rights and in-country distributed networks. And then we also do spend quite a great deal of time on making sure that the devices are safe. Not only have they gotten the proper regulatory approval but we have used our network to test the product and they have provided specialized qualitative and quantitative feedback. So this is all with the idea of building a platform and a brand that can be trusted over time so that people know we're only going to carry the products that work. A couple of the innovations that we do distribute that we're very proud of for a range of reasons. Our signature focus is on postpartum hemorrhage. As many of you may know this is postpartum hemorrhage is a leading cause of death for women around the time of childbirth. It is truly an obstetric emergency. You have two hours to save a woman's life once she starts a massive hemorrhage if you cannot get her to transfusion to care to a series of other clinical interventions. So this is perhaps one of our most beloved devices because it is so simple. It's a neoprene suit. It's entirely external. It's non-pharmaceutical. Basically it's a compression device that wraps around a woman's body and auto transfuses blood to the core of her body. I mentioned that so you get a sense of a range of postpartum hemorrhage devices that we research and then actually distribute. The next example is more in what you might think of as a typical medical device, but each of them has a very interesting often decade long history behind its development. I could do a webinar on each and every one of these. The first one is the Cradle by MicroLife developed by King's College. It is the first and only rugged handheld blood pressure monitor that is specifically calibrated and tested to detect hypertensive disorders in pregnancy. There's a lot to unpack there, but it is an amazing little device unlike anything else that is out there. The item below that is we have partnered with Phillips. That is a wind-up fetal heart rate monitor that allows you to monitor fetal heart rate adopter off the grid. Finally in the third column, an example of infant warming and hypothermia, we have the Warmey-Lew device which is to warm infants either in transport, in the home, or in a facility. It has been used for all of those purposes. You can check that up on our website. It is a very exciting and very low-cost reusable device. Finally in the lower right, another one of these very interesting global health products that has perhaps a 15-year history behind it. We have been involved, I would say, the last eight years in total in researching the attributes of the device, pilot testing in different settings, adaptations of the device, and this is a stick-on liquid crystal thermometer that allows non-literate, non-numerate mothers and health care workers to test, actually to be alerted to the core temperature of an infant. It was developed to detect hypothermia, but we are actually working with a partner to expand its use to develop both high fever and hypothermia. This is in large volumes, this costs just perhaps 15 cents for a reusable little device. That's a very quick overview. Let's see, five examples of about 45 different products that we distribute. Just to give you an idea of the type of work that we were doing and researching when the Zika Challenge came along. Because I know a lot of folks on the line might be most interested in the equity crowd funding, this is the issue that plagued all of us with tech and other startups is how do you raise funds? We have been fortunate enough to have a very positive experience, so I just want to insert here a quick overview. On the right you will see the other sources of funding that MATERNOVA has used over the last five plus years. We started with grants, both a couple small and large. We then moved, we had loans, we raised the seed round from impact or social enterprise angels. We were able to raise some funds through prizes and business plan competitions. We did one small but successful, very small crowd funding round on MedStarter. These are all the pieces that we've used and I know a lot of other entrepreneurs who are listening will be familiar with putting together a range of different sources of funding. What happened in early 2016 was that equity crowd fund, well actually Republic approached us and equity crowd funding really burst upon the scene. In short, what equity crowd funding does is it democratizes angel investing. So taking the model of the general crowd funding, it actually applies that to the general public. And what was once a very exclusive club made up of folks who had a certain number of million dollars or more in assets or in the bank, those were called angel investors. What was once this exclusive club has now been opened at least in the U.S. and other places where the legislation allows it. It has now been opened to the crowd. So what are the implications of that? That means instead of a startup or a team going only to accredited angels, they can actually, and as we did, they can raise actual investment from the crowd. Something that was literally impossible to do because of the SEC regulations even a couple years ago. So this is really a key change and it's hard to overstate what it means for startups. Why else did we work with Republic and go for equity crowd funding? We loved the fact that they focused on impact and women led companies. So they are a typical equity crowd funding platform but they see impact and women led companies as key to their growth and to overall growth. And so we found this very exciting. Second, equity crowd funding, there's a lot of details on this but there's less obsession with valuation of the company. So when we've worked with traditional angels, we've spent months talking about how much the company is worth. The way that equity crowd funding works is that you spend less time on that is the simplest way to say it and there is an implicit understanding that it is hard to value an early stage company and you're able to just move ahead postponing that issue. Third, as I mentioned, this is really the key and the light bulb is democratization of angel investing. We love anything that democratizes finance, financing startups and technology. So that was a no-brainer for us. Faster and potentially less resource intensive than angel groups. Yes, we from start to finish the whole campaign was about seven months. So that certainly proved to be the case that it was much faster. And it's just more creative, which also fits our mindset, open to investors and opening the whole concept of investing to other engineers, to social scientists, to really anyone who had a passion for the idea and saw the promise. Okay, so I will say more about the equity crowd funding but encourage you to look at republic.co, to look at our campaign, which is which is closed and was successful and helped to launch the product that I'm going to talk about right now. And I will pause for one minute here. Okay, so if we go to the next slide, I want to delve into the technology itself. As you could tell, we were very focused on traditional medical devices and diagnostics and suddenly, at least from the public's point of view, the Zika virus swept onto the scene as a very unique threat to pregnant women. At first our response was, well, you know, we'll look for a rapid test and as soon as a rapid test becomes available, we will distribute that to our current network and let them know what's available. But we had also been doing quite a bit of research on textile and nanotechnology for a number of the different products on which we work. So, let's go to the Zika virus and I think most people will know what is so disturbing. We don't want to, you know, put up a lot of disturbing photos here. Everyone's probably seeing them, but the risk of microcephaly of a brain and skull that's smaller than normal in the fetus is much higher, particularly in the first few months of pregnancy. If a person is contracts the Zika virus from the bite of a mosquito, it does involve and result in lifelong brain damage and disability, lifelong suffering for the family and the child. You know, this isn't just a physiological or physical abnormality. You know, there's quite a bit of pain and suffering involved. And the other just piece to note, what's different because a lot of folks will be familiar with malaria, the Zika virus is transmitted in the daytime for the most part and we will talk quite a bit about how the knowledge of the way the virus is transmitted and the way that it particularly affects women is relevant to the design process of the technology that we're working on. So, this is clearly women and men have been battling the mosquito for time immemorial and we're all familiar with other vector control methods that are working well inside, particularly the bed net pictured here. And then in the next slide, other vector control methods for outside spraying. We were fortunate to be part of a Zika network put together by CAMPEC and learned about all kinds of fascinating technologies from larva sides to put in the drinking water or the rainwater fish that you may have heard about that would eat the larvae of the culprit mosquito. Quite a range of identification of the mosquito, mobile health, I mean the number of innovations and then moving into vaccines as well as a genetically modified mosquitoes. There is no shortage of innovation there, so we weren't sure at first what our role would be. What we did know is that our network focused on women, empowering women and all of our research and all of our advisors focused on women and what we did know is that women who were pregnant were very afraid there were the news stories and the data on women hiding inside and their only option seemed to be, you know, in a personal sense was to spray themselves with insecticide. For those of us who are ecologically and environmentally minded, this is often a trade-off and comes with some questions. If I'm spraying deep on my clothes and my skin what do we know about the impact of that crossing the placenta and there's a lot of open questions there. So we said about and we worked with the CAMTEX team and we focused on nanotechnology and particularly on textile and the the fabric and innovations that we had uncovered basically looked at repellent in a new way. Instead of spraying it onto the skin or spraying it onto the fabric in the course of the manufacturing process as a separate step, this new technology embedded the insecticide or the repellent at a molecular level as part of the fabric. It's the repellent with a long-standing safety profile in Europe and elsewhere. When it was put into this form it has no odor and it rests on the outside of the fabric. What is most important about it is that it retains its strength over many, many washings so often when you get at a textile that's been sprayed with permethrin etc it really doesn't last for a terribly long time. So these are just a few of the aspects of the technology that were so exciting to us and we decided to enter the idea and put it in front of Grand Challenges and what was truly innovative from a gender perspective was thinking about this from the point of view of a pregnant woman all of us on the team having held that identity at one point and being able to really talk to women and midwives and OBGYNs around the world about what was missing. If you think about the inside and outside vector control a lot of that works well for let's say for malaria where you tuck yourself under a bed net for the evening. What's different about Zika and the risk to women is first of all its greatest risk is to pregnant women in the early stages of their pregnancy when they may not know they're pregnant. Second of all women women work they work outside the home around the home they travel to gather water and other materials they may sell in commercial areas in the suburban and urban areas that are at greatest risk of Zika. So there are many aspects to a person moving through time and space that really were not well covered. Again if we go back to the if we go back to the spray it's just not culturally acceptable in many countries to spray yourself from head to toe with a repellent that does smell. It's also frankly quite costly and we developed a partnership with americare and worked quite a bit in El Salvador to validate some of the cost and user perceptions related to mosquito protection. So what was truly innovative for us was putting together cutting-edge science the nanotechnology material fashion which I'll get into in a minute and then our global distribution ability and being able to see that there could really be a market for something that was truly woman controlled that was not specific to pregnancy but could encompass pregnancy and that that item was really apparel. So we go back to again controlled by the woman worn by the woman travels with her wherever she goes cost less than cost less than you know a pregnancy long supply of insecticide and is something that she actually wants to use and I think that's where the fashion piece comes into this. Does it mean high fashion and couture? Well in this case we were lucky enough to partner with someone where it did did mean that but our central premise was in my co-founder Allison will will often say you know women should not feel punished for protecting themselves from Zika and and if you're wearing a net or spraying yourself with something that doesn't smell good it is it can feel like a punishment nor should women have to huddle and hide inside. So it was really an empowerment piece that we were interested in what is something they could use that was a technology but that they would be actually proud to use and in this case wear. So the first sketches were you know pretty basic but we had to get started you know we knew we had to get started in El Salvador we had a very exciting partnership with americares in that they were already giving out anti Zika mother kits to all of their pregnant women so they were very interested in doing a qualitative study with all of the pregnant women to see what their response would be to protective apparel that was embedded with the dana technology so this is you know it's very basic we created a very quick but semi-attractive maternity t-shirt that looks like a normal t-shirt but does have the technology embedded and this was the prototype while we were developing something a little bit more elegant. This is the team in El Salvador showing the shirt to the pregnant women it was embedded as part of the training for both community health workers the the obstetrician and the women were all told about the repellent being embedded in the shirts and then they wore them and provided feedback and let's go to the next slide here you can see they've got some of the training materials on the right and the women have the shirt so this was part of what we were working on from early 2016 through to the to the fall. As I mentioned we did want to partner with someone you know fashion is not it is perhaps a hobby but certainly not the core competency of maternova we were fortunate enough to be able to partner with someone who really understood a few things first of all she elisandra gold understood the threat of zika she's born in brazil and her family still lives and works there and actually it's her city of origin was the third most impacted by the zika virus so here's someone who is from from brazil understands the fear is a mother herself but most importantly she is a well-known designer and she understands what women want and like to wear so we were very fortunate to partner with alisandra gold for the designs of the product itself and let's see let's see and over the course of several months with the input from the groups in el Salvador as well as the input from a number of specialists in zika four pieces were designed with the vector behavior in mind in this case it is a mosquito that bites in the day a mosquito that likes to to actually we learned is attracted to darker fabrics and colors so this was the reason to make it light it is attracted to the legs so the leggings actually as pictured here they'll actually be longer they're actually the manufacturing run that is and now will be quite a bit longer and and so you know covering the hands as well you can see in the cardigan in the upper right we are covering as much of the body as possible with a light fabric each piece is imbued with the repellent the nanotechnology textile and these are these are the final prototypes and the final design for the first run of the nova veil protective apparel line the maternity dress is really quite ingenious you know we need something that can be elegant that can be worn by someone who doesn't look pregnant and in fact is not pregnant eventually what we anticipate is that adolescent girls and women would be wearing mosquito protective apparel and so it would not become a stigmatized statement that you're wearing something announcing to the world that you are pregnant we have ourselves put on this dress and when it cinches to a non-pregnant body it just looks like a regular dress the internal ties expand so that you could change the sizing every day as the belly expands so it's really thoughtfully designed to be extremely flexible based on what women need during this critical time again it's a it's a time of vulnerability to a disease that has lifelong implications for the entire family so we keep going back to that and the more we learn about this mosquito and the spread of the disease the faster we can adapt and shift okay so i've told you a little bit about matter nova and a bit about how we funded the early part of our work and then how the equity crowd funding became a really exciting vehicle for us you know going to a bunch of male angel investors and i hate to generalize but this has been our experience in telling them that we're creating a specialized maternity dress with nanotechnology it's just not a cell it's just not something that is typically related to but when we went on republic and we embraced the crowd and they embrace the idea it was a very different experience everyone can relate to being pregnant having a pregnant relative and and could could personally resonate with the really the fear of the zika virus and so combining all of these messages has not been straightforward or easy but it was very readily done on on the republic site so fashion meets vector control we're still working on the messaging around this as as the zika epidemic as and flows and you know there was some concern when at some point the WHO declared zika no longer an emergency but if you you know stay in touch with the folks on the ground and the the CDC and others tracking the disease because it's no longer emergency is not necessarily good news it means it settled in in some some areas and there are many folks who are waiting to see how and when and if zika does make a comeback in the meantime it has affected thousands and thousands of of women with I believe it's the latest count is 2600 infants born with the microcephaly and the lifelong burden just in brazil alone it is also still being found in in areas of the U.S. but beyond zika you know it's very important to note that we think that that this idea of personal protective apparel that people actually want to wear will have very interesting implications in the fight against other illnesses first of all the same mosquito that carries zika also transmits dange yellow fever which you will have seen in the news this year in brazil and she can gunja some recent work has shown that the single bite of one mosquito can transmit two or three of these at once and so you begin to look at ways in which protective apparel could have a very long cast a wide net so to speak beyond that there's a bit of research about malaria and biting you know sort of an early evening when people are not tucked away under their bed nets and and are at risk of the malaria mosquito transmitting disease and then finally another massive public health really it is an emergency at this point in the U.S. is Lyme Lyme disease and this textile does repel the ticks that carry Lyme and so we're looking at that piece as well but it is an interesting case of a solution to a particular disease that was very specific to time and place but actually has you know very very wide ranging implications to some of the the truly discourages of man and woman kind as far as fighting disease in a new way now we would never say that people should wear this you know wear a dress and therefore you know be protected the recommendations will always be that you also want to apply some skin based repellent that you also want to use a bed net that was Zika you also need to use condoms because of it is a sexually transmitted disease and you also want to do all of the other vector control methods but we do think that it is a very new tool and we are working with some groups to test a very basic but still attractive version of this dress in refugee camps and elsewhere for adolescent and women of childbearing age who are at risk so I'm going to wrap up in about four or five minutes so that we can we can get to questions but I want to just circle back to the equity crowd funding on republic and there are other platforms as well we can only speak to our own experience and the fact that the timing was was perfect here we have you know not been so lucky with the timing on other financing rounds and so it's you know it's it's joy frankly to be able to talk about this one we were one of the first four companies to launch on the platform we were able to raise over a hundred thousand dollars to launch nova veil and we did so in six months which is quite fast for a company like matter nova women's health global health this is the probably the most exciting piece is that we attracted dozens of new investors an investor an angel slash equity investor on a crowd funding platform like this can invest as little as 10 or 20 dollars and become part of the company can become an investor in the company we had folks that did much larger investments but to us each of these means a different kind of support and people are able to invest what what is important to them and you know what's important to people who can only invest 20 dollars is different from what's important to others and that's what's so exciting about this mechanism and then in doing that we as I mentioned we we feel like we were able to participate in a democratization of angel investing just to speak briefly about our market opportunity for the nova veil line we are obviously looking first at early market penetration into Latin America specifically in El Salvador where there already are active users of the the line and we're doing a follow-up study and with the folks in El Salvador to see how the women like the more complete outfits that were designed over the course of the fall and winter so the full dress and the leggings I should note here because I think I left it out that the qualitative results were really strong so women over 95 percent of them liked wearing the apparel they understood what it did they might have had some input on color and fit and that sort of thing but in general the response was quite quite strong and positive we'll we'll also be looking at engaging our in-country distribution partners in west Africa and other places at risk of mosquito-borne illness and government clients and ministries of health so this is a really new it's new territory we have to market it to some as purely fashion and we have to market it to others as a public health intervention and we're working on doing the right studies and effectiveness trials to be able to do that wholeheartedly and with strong clinical evidence with the confluence of the republic launch the threat of Zika and this innovative approach we were lucky enough to be featured in Forbes Mashable and BBC all of which helps to fuel demands and marketing of the product worldwide but I think I will stop there and I have plenty of time for questions I think you know this this particular example we're really excited about it because it is truly woman-focused and girl-focused and it's truly new and different and you know we're interested in ideas input partners people who want to pilot and really all of the above to make this a reality because we do believe that women you know who are caring that it's next generation should not have to live in fear and should not have to feel as though they're being punished they should feel empowered as they move through their day and that's that's where I'll leave it thank you Anna. Thank you so much Meg and I have to tell you this hits very close to home for me personally as a recently new mother who was actually quite nervous about travel we have family Puerto Rico and that's a region that was hit also quite badly with Zika so at my heart goes out certainly to all of the pregnant women and the new mothers throughout to these regions that have to fear for you know their their children's lives and this is really exciting to see your investment in new technologies so at this point I certainly like to open up the floor to questions from all of our attendees for Meg I'll go ahead and get us started with a couple of questions that came to mind for me of course congratulations on your success with Republic and your ability to attract investors it's really exciting to hear your success story I'd love to hear from you if you can share with our attendees any tips for effectively leveraging Republic or other equity crowdfunding platforms it is because you focused on one specific technology is that the key is there some other methods that you find particularly useful in in leveraging as a platform that you like to share sure yes I mean this is one of the things we have struggled with because we are a marketplace we do you know a range of technologies and that is very hard as it turns out it's hard to fundraise for at least in this in the global health space and so I do think it's I don't know if we would have come to the attention of Republic because they did reach out to us if we hadn't had this new technology and so although we personally are big believers in a range of technological and behavioral approaches to things I would say that it you know it was because of this one proprietary product that I think we did get traction so so you know that's that's the honest answer no appreciate your honesty certainly so then I kind of building on that question one of our attendees wants to know if there were any unique challenges with equity crowdfunding and kind of building on that how do you gain momentum on the platform on the round right so I think the one of the biggest challenges is that it's new and so anyone who is already you know an angel investor is going to be a little suspicious and and anyone who's got a you know a legal degree or just is inquisitive and curious is going to need and want and rightfully should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what equity crowdfunding is and once you delve in you know it's a new it's new and so anything that's new and a new mechanism particularly in finance with legal implications this is going to take folks time to understand so we have the sense that are many many folks who might have been interested who will wait it out to see how equity crowdfunding does in the long term and so then you lose people there so that's the first challenge is that it was new a second challenge is that it was hard to get small international investors so above a certain amount the platform could orchestrate investments from overseas but you know what we locked out on is that true global crowd effect and once that is sorted out and I believe it will be you know our audience is mostly global and so you know we kind of had to work through that and I think lost a lot of folks there as well so if someone wanted to send in $20 or $500 from you know Kenya they couldn't do it for this round so those were two challenges and the third was the setup from an organizational capacity point of view and just the things that you have to do to file with the SEC are quite monumental so this is not you know something where you just load up your ideas and you're good to go and it took us probably two months to prep it working with their legal and accounting team so it's not an easy answer. So of course just pulling on that thread a little bit you mentioned that Republic provides you with support from their legal team and do you know and I'm not suggesting that you are a Republic representative so please feel free to hold on that answer but do they generally provide support of that kind to all of the ventures who are on their platform or is that unique to you because you're one of the first. There were definitely some perks to being in the first cohort but that said it's not as though you're left on your own I mean they've learned a tremendous amount and have streamlined it further and have amazing partners in legal and accounting who are continuing to be helpful to new candidates and I imagine it's the same for everyone. Okay that's great to know it's really helpful. Another one of our listeners wants to know and you mentioned that you actually did as part of your fundraising strategy do regular crowdfunding so maybe you could speak to how Republic is different than let's say Kickstarter in terms of benefits. Sure I mean I think what Nadine is referring to is benefits to an investor so for Kickstarter and Indiegogo you are putting in funding for the product and you're getting a reward usually some aspect of the product in its prototype phase or beyond. We also do that in equity crowdfunding but the difference is that you are actually investing in the company and so at a future point in time and this is the mechanism is called a crowd safe which is a secure agreement for future equity. You will actually be an investor in the company so you will hold equity in the company and if it goes public you'll get a piece of that if it's sold you'll get a piece of that so it's a complicated transaction but that's the big difference. Got it so that's really I think a powerful differentiator and the fact that you can invest a $20 is certainly is exciting. There's an extension to the question. Do you see from another listener do you see downside to having a term sheet with many more participants? Is there any impact on business decisions? Sure and you know it's again we're obviously risk takers right I mean we have a startup we work in global health we are doing equity crowdfunding we have a very strong appetite for risk. That said and we're learning this live as we go. I should mention that one of the benefits of equity crowdfunding at least the way that Republic does it is that the way it is structured you really you deal with a single entry let's say on your cap table for your business and there are some intermediaries that organize and manage all these folks. So from a that doesn't answer the business decision issue but from just the mechanics of the business and the shareholders they are you know managed as a group from a yes from the business impact decision absolutely makes a difference. So you know we'll have to see but we do feel very much accountable and we are accountable to those folks who invested in the Nova Bay line and we have to report to them not just product milestones but also the business milestones related to that line of our business and because there are so many of them and because of the public nature of the raise you know they do weigh quite heavily in the business decisions so you know for example had this not been raised through equity crowd funding and we ran into let's say X, Y, and Z stumbling blocks related to Nova Vale we might say well let's delay that you know let's put that product on hold we do not have the same sense that we can can or should do that because of the type of investors that we have behind that product that's sort of a general way of answering it that yes it absolutely does affect the business. Thank you that's really a deeply insightful answer. Another question now pivoting a little bit towards the technology itself and the impact of the technology in the case of Zika infected women apart from microcephaly which is an impact to their newborn are there any other avoidable outcomes? So I think the way I'm reading this question is what are other effects of the Zika virus beyond microcephaly that can be avoided through technology like the Nova Vale sorry. Trying to think I mean there are neurological effects that they don't fully understand in the adults that contract Zika so it's not you know the biggest most dramatic visible and long lasting effect that we can see right away is this what happens to the newborn to the fetus in the first few months. There are neurological effects which I'm not particularly well equipped to describe in adults who contract Zika. There are problems ranging from eyesight there's a lot of eyesight related issues beyond the disability and the neurological issues and then there's just movement and behavioral issues that are related to the disease and then they're only beginning to understand what the impact of co-infection with you know say you get dengue and Zika together are. There is good news on another front that you know some medical findings that you could intervene in other ways with a vaccine for example to prevent the virus. I hope that answers the question. Absolutely especially because the follow-up question from the same listener was about the Zika virus vaccine so I think you hit it right there but you did mention that you were looking at other applications of the novel veil including malaria obviously dengue what how far in those investigations are you how close are you to releasing I guess the versions of the novel veil they're applicable to other diseases. Sure well there's a couple of different strains to the answer so the same products that are we're manufacturing right now so those four designs that you saw so if someone were to wear them they would have a certain level of protection against the mosquito carrying all of those diseases both kinds of mosquito the one that carries malaria and the one that carries Zika, she can go dengue etc as well as ticks. Our challenge is going to be we're going to have to particularly in the US for Lyme we're going to have to do extended studies to show exactly how protected people are before we can sell this within the US and say that it is apparel that protects you from Lyme for example. Aside from the you know this maternity concept I mean certainly folks have already asked well what about a wrap or a sling or a cover for the baby and in fact the way that Alessandra Gold designed the scarf the camouflage scarf is that it is for a woman to wear over her head around her neck but it is also for women to wear while breastfeeding or to put over the baby's cradle. So you know we don't know I mean we certainly know that any insect bite for a newborn or an infant is not you know not a positive sign so that would be our next line of defense and work would be on on products for children and for newborns. That is really exciting to hear especially again I think of myself as a prime cause of candidate and customer for a product like that. One last question before we have to wrap up many of the end users of the novel rail would be in really underserved communities low income communities worldwide. We haven't talked about the price point around this building but how have you I think you see to it how have you structured this in order to make it accessible financially for those types of consumers for the base of the pyramid consumers. Sure that's a great question and something we you know struggle with the messaging because if we have you know we have a picture of a model in Miami wearing the outfit and it was designed by someone who does high end designs but you know it was it was designed to have that look but be very affordable so the price point as with everything varies tremendously based on volumes but our target customer for the base of the pyramid is the health system or the clinics and others who are looking for a way to protect women. That's really our primary customer so we're looking at the dress being a subsidized by the sales in higher income countries and so we actually don't have the final price point but you know I will say that the entire design and production and distribution strategy is being developed and really the business model is being developed so that it will be affordable for women at the base of the pyramid and in same way that we worked with America's in El Salvador you know the women actually didn't pay for the the prototypes they received they were received as part of a package they didn't pay for anything in anti Zika mother kids they're low income women at highest risk and that's how we would hope to and plan to you know get this to them that it would be a public health tool not a not a luxury item that they would have to purchase we did we have been talking to a us based department of public health that is interested in vector control because they've got a large number of folks who do hail from the Caribbean originally or are visiting family and go back and forth and they're specifically interested in the maternity dress as a form of vector control in their anti Zika mother kids so not a straight answer on price but that you know that it was designed for base of the pyramid and that's how we we plan to proceed well many times in social entrepreneurship there is no sustained as a straight answer per se but I appreciate your honesty and transparency and sharing where you are in the process and with that we have gone a couple minutes over time I hope and I'm actually quite certain that most of our participants don't mind I'd like to thank you Mac for sharing your experiences in developing this novel technology and also raising funding to support it very exciting to hear about your journey and I'd like to thank you like heartily for sharing it with us and I'd like to thank all of our attendees today for those of you who are seeking to get pHs the code is listed on the slide if you have questions that we didn't address please feel free to email us at webinarsengineeringforchange.org and don't forget to become an E4C member to get information about upcoming webinars there will be a recording of this webinar available and you will receive notification about it with that I'd like to thank everybody wish you all a good morning good afternoon or good evening depending where you are and look forward to catching you on the next E4C webinar thank you bye bye