 My name is Oriana Brechker. I am the CEO and founder of a company called AquaCycle. We provide distributed sanitation solutions as well as distributed wastewater treatment for industrial clients, working anywhere without a sewer grid or an energy grid to defeat climate change and help access to critical sanitation around the world. I am also a Cartier 2021 fellow. And it's my pleasure to be your moderator today to give you a little bit of background about Cartier, why we're here, and to introduce to you some incredible entrepreneurs. So first off, the Cartier Women's Initiative started with a vision, a world in which every woman impact entrepreneur driving change can achieve her full potential. And throughout the execution of this vision, it became very clear that women face the unique set of challenges. And so the Cartier Women's Initiative is set up specifically to shine a light on women impact entrepreneurs and help give them financial, social and human capital throughout their journey to support their business growth and their leadership skills. So throughout this process, Cartier decided to focus on a very specific part of that journey. So as these women are developing their impact businesses, they've demonstrated revenue, they've demonstrated customer traction. However, from there, it's very challenging to scale. And so the Cartier Women's Initiative program has specifically focused on this stage of business to encourage that growth and to remove the barriers that are often gender-based in scaling in these businesses. So how they do this, not only through the programs, but these programs are supported by three pillars, fellowship, community and thought leadership. And there are 11 program categories, nine are regional. And the regional focused fellowships are very specific to organizations to businesses that are for profit, that have been around for six years or less, and are revenue generating, but are just on that cusp of scaling so they haven't raised too much money just yet. The other two categories are focused on different types of businesses. So one is the science and technology category. And in this segment, the impact businesses may be a little bit older in terms of age of development. R&D takes a little bit longer. So these would be your deep tech type of organizations. And then the newest category is the diversity, equity and inclusion category, which was to recognize solutions that are specifically designed to close the gaps of access, outcome or opportunity for communities that have been underrepresented or underserved. And this award is open to all genders. By definition, it is inclusive. So over the last several years since 2006, the Cartier Women's Initiative has supported nearly 300 entrepreneurs coming from 63 different countries and deployed nine and a half million euros in capital to these impact businesses. Now, there's this no easy feat. The Cartier Women's Initiative receives over a thousand applications almost every single year. And they have to apply a selection criteria, which is very merit based to select for the 33 fellows every single year. Now this is a very rigorous due diligence, I know from experience. And they do this in partnership with a fund, Sagana. And Sagana ensures an independent and robust due diligence process to validate the business, ensuring that they're ready to attract customers and funders and partnerships in the future. Another part of this process and validating and selecting for these fellows is the jury members. So the jury members are 100% volunteer. And they are ultimately the ones that select the final entrepreneurs. Now the jury members that participate are selected based on their entrepreneurial experience, their business achievements and their commitment to supporting diverse entrepreneurs. So today it is my pleasure to introduce to you 10 of these incredible entrepreneurs from the Cartier Women's Initiative. Now the order of show today is going to be really based on the stage of their company. So the first six presenters, seven presenters are going to be in the earlier stage of their formation, so more seed stage. And then the latter presenters are more late seed to series A. Each fellow has four minutes to pitch. And then there will be a 30 minute networking session on the terrace for everybody to follow up with any questions that you might have. Now I want to make very clear every single one of these fellows is raising money now. So please take your notes. And I'm very excited to introduce to you our first fellow. Dr. Ishani Roy, who is a 2023 fellow using her background in science and engineering to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable through her company, Serene. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Ishani. I'm the founder and CEO of Serene. We work to make the workplace and society a little bit more equitable, a little bit more safe. When I talk about diversity and inclusion, some companies tell me, oh, that DNA training. Yes, we do it once a year. But it's not that simple, right? You will agree with me that the state of equity in the world is not that simple. Let me tell you about a story. This is 20 years ago in rural India, story of Bhanwari Devi. Some of you might know. She was a rural woman. She lived in the villages. She was employed by the government of India to work on things like sanitation, child literacy, and other things. So one day she came across a marriage that was taking place between a girl child of age one and an elderly man of age 50. So she tried to stop that marriage from happening. Unfortunately, the next night, middle of the night, it did happen. She couldn't do anything. Six months down the line, she was working in the fields. By the way, those villagers were not happy that she meddled in their business. So she was working in the fields with her husband. Her husband was beaten up. She was gang raped by six men from that village. And this will break your heart. Five of them, the girl child's family. Now she went to the police. She went to the doctors. Nobody helped her. Finally, months later, some organization filed a public interest litigation against the government of India saying, you employed this woman. She was just doing her job. You could not keep her safe. So 10 years later, this case came to a close. She never received justice for what happened to her. But we got something called prevention of sexual harassment of women in their workplace. Now, even until last year, there were laws in Southeast Asia which criminalized same sex union. This is the state of equity in the world, right? I didn't know any of these things. I was studying mathematics. I was working on building artificial human heart. I was working on all these fancy things. One thing I noticed though, there were very few me's in every room that I went in. There were very few women. There were very few people for any minority group, right? You talk about class, caste, religion. They were not there in the workplace facing discrimination biases. So this is what we decided to do. Use my background in science and research to talk about equity, making the workplace more equitable and safe and to build products which are more inclusive. How do we do this? We do it in two ways. One is the human touch. Every conversation that we have with our clients on biases, on inclusive leadership, on making the, you know, adjudicating on cases of sexual harassment, not a single case should be brushed under the carpet. We do it with behavioral research. We talk about data. And we have a product which uses statistical models to not only quantify and measure diversity numbers, but how do you make sure you quantify and measure inclusion? So we talk about microaggressions. We talk about psychological safety, measure them. And we have courses in 10 different languages which tells you how not to do those things. So we have had incredible, you know, opportunity to have scaled to about 25 countries in the last few years. Our custom, you know, legal content has really resonated with a lot of people working with startups, unicorns and enterprise companies. So what we want today is utilize this wonderful community, go into collaborations on HR tech, legal tech, and we are looking for value partners. We work with a lot of investors where we actually measure the data of their portfolio companies. How can they do better? And we also take care of their compliances and equity for their portfolio companies. So what we are looking for is a lot of collaboration as well as a value partner to help us scale in US, UK, and Africa. I know I spoke very fast. So thank you very much. My contact is up in there. Thank you. Our second presenter today is Wendy Owens, who is a 2023 fellow, who is a seasoned entrepreneur that describes nature as being her first paying job, and has translated that to her company, Hexis Biomass. Please welcome Wendy. Thank you. My name is Wendy Owens. I'm the founder and CEO of Hexis Biomass, and we are making a material change to the world. We're doing this with our plant based substitute for wood and fossil fuel based materials. Because we need this right now, we have problems that need to be solved from the raw material, the very start of our supply chain. Because as we turn away from fossil fuel based raw materials, people are looking to use trees in even more than the 15 billion trees that are cut down every year to replace those fossil fuel based raw materials. Now the other solution that we have is for the 208 million acres of marginal abandoned crop land that are around the world. We can actually use our solution as we grow it to recover that crop land and make it usable for food production again. So what we produce is called xanofiber, and it can be used to make all sorts of products from biofuels to boards to paper to textiles. Just one solution goes into those many different products and directly into the current manufacturing systems. So we get our xanofiber from a grass I developed called xanograss, and it looks very much like corn and bamboo had a baby. It's very tall, big corn leaves, and it grows annually. It's a perennial we put in the ground, it'll grow for 20 years after one planting. We use marginal land so we're not displacing food crops. And we also you have a low water use production for this plan. No pesticides are needed. And we have really high carbon sequestration capabilities. These are selectively bred there proprietary to our company. So our advantages are very much that we simply produce so much biomass on a per acre basis than these competitors. So we're land use efficient, we're carbon negative, we also can grow in many different locations around the world. So we can grow closer facilities. We are an EPA approved bioenergy crop meets renewable fuel standard here in the US, which means if you use our crop for production of biofuels, the US government will pay you on a certain amount on a per ton basis. So I'm speaking of per tons, we are lower cost per ton, our inputs are lower. We don't have to use a lot of water or a lot of nitrogen fertilizer or anything like that. We actually just lower cost in terms of production. And also because we have so much biomass per acre. So I've developed what I call the farm to fiber platform. This allows us to propagate the sterile plant no seeds not invasive to produce it to harvest it and then to process it into a format that drops right into the current manufacturing systems that exist. You do not have to change your light fixture to use our light bulb. This is patent pending. We sign long term supply agreements and sell by the ton. And we can utilize farmers and their marginal land in which they're not making income or making very little income on and give them a steady supply of revenue for multiple years. We've extreme carbon sequestration capabilities above ground because we grow so much grass but below ground we have to have the matching root system to support that high level of growth. So we request for over a ton of carbon per acre per year in the soil. Our lifecycle analysis is pretty darn good when you compare it to different packaging products, paper products as well as different types of fuels. So we are looking genuinely to have this sustainable impact through clean energy production. This substitutes again right for food crops so we don't have to use corn or soybean or even sugarcane for and use food growing growing land cradle to grave recyclability climate change through carbon sequestration and life on land. We are focused on energy pellets fiber boards and pulp right now. We have pilots in each one of those. We also have a DOE grant for sustainable aviation fuel. We're currently raising a two million dollar round. We have one million dollars committed of that and I look forward to speaking with you guys afterwards if you're interested in learning more about hexes. Thank you so much. Thank you Wendy. Our next presenter is Blake van Putten. He is a 2023 fellow who is a clothing designer with a business background that is creating clothing to support the black community and bring donations back to the community through his company size. Hello everyone. I would tell you to close your eyes but I'd forget to tell you to open them but I want you to just take a journey with me. Imagine this. Imagine if you were in this world and you didn't have any limitations you can accomplish anything that you put your mind to and you could just do anything. Nothing is preventing you from that. What would you do. That's just the craziest question to really think about and it's just a dream come true. Originally being from Los Angeles California I had a really great upbringing. I was able to go to Howard University study supply chain management. I took my talents to New York City where I worked on Wall Street where I was able to soak in as much knowledge as possible so that I could be a resource for other people to help open up the dreams that they have. With that I started a clothing agency where I help different black owned businesses and small businesses with the development of their clothing their logo design their graphic design and everything. But then the murder of George Floyd happened. I realized that all the businesses that I was helping out it wasn't really doing enough for them and I felt like I need to change the overall business structure of how it was impacting the world and what was around me. That's when I pivoted from business to business to business to consumer. So I want you to take a look at everything that is on the screen right here today. They have different pictures. These are all different campaigns that I put together with the resources from my team to focus on creating clothing that is not only sustainable but gives back to the community through our funding but it's a dream come true because of the resources that I have and the people that are around me. Now the elephant in the room. Realistically in the fashion industry there's a lack of diversity. There's tons of inequality. There's a high unemployment rate. People don't have the resources and there aren't any likeness in terms of businesses every single day. I put stats on here to show you guys some of the statistics in terms of what that means but I feel as if everybody in this room can relate to being limited in terms of your accomplishments and what you are doing. Stronger threads for a stronger community. The brand CICE. That's our motto. My name is Blake Van Putten, CEO and founder of CICE. I started it as a way to uplift, embrace and celebrate the black community. We create these different types of pieces whether they're statement pieces that say protect black people, protect black women, vegan products, sustainable products. We have it all but we're focused on being not only a fashion house but a company that uplifts, collaborates and works with our community to showcase those that have been silenced or are unheard. So be part of the solution. In terms of overall growth and what we have today we've split this up into different categories for where we are as a business. The business annual revenue is about 4.4 million dollars. As far as our overall impact we've had the opportunity of donating over 80,000 dollars to different black-owned organizations. Over 60,000 dollars to different products for those that are around us. Have a lot of programming efforts, strategy initiatives and everything that's around us. I'm super excited. A big part that we're focusing on is we just finished our fourth season in New York Fashion Week where we debuted our latest collection that was inspired by different types of designers. Those that are around us to showcase the next level of where we're going to be. We want to use this as a way and a vehicle for our retail distribution. With the retail distribution we already have one major retailer that we're looking for but we want to amplify an uplift to hit more in a faster rate. We want to increase the staff. Everybody on my team we're lean and we just continue to do what we're doing so that way we can grow and elevate. While we also have staff expansion, product expansion, development and the overall development of the business in itself. So you can be part of the community and everything around. A big portion on it is to really think about what you have to the world without any types of limitations and if you could do anything what would that be? I'm so happy to be part of Socap and be part here. I have I'm part of the conscious marketplace. You can check it out, see the products for yourself. Give me some feedback. Let me know what you think. If you have a product that you have any suggestions on, if you're an artist, a graphic designer, whatever your impact is, I want to amplify, uplift and build the community around. Thank you. Thank you, Blake. Our next presenter, Miriam Torsian, is a 2023 fellow who is using her background in law, data science and human rights to provide resources to women suffering gender-based violence through her company, Save You. Please welcome, Miriam. Meet Tamar. Tamar is a young mother of a toddler girl who was receiving birth threats from her ex-husband days after he attacked them by force in New Kyrton Garden. Nobody was there and she couldn't make any phone calls. Imagine if she was you or your family member. What would you do in her case? And Tamar represents one in free women worldwide experiencing some form of sexual or physical violence, a pandemic that costs our economies a minimum of 1.5 trillion a year and killing 50,000 women a year by someone they trusted. To address this urgent issue, we created Save You, a virtual safe space for women in the form of mobile app that provides access to safety, support services, professional consultations and community. Save You AI platform is a multi-stakeholder space for governments, international organizations, professionals and NGOs uniting and bridging their efforts to support women. Through our platform, these organizations are monitoring trends and cases of violence in real time, conducting case management, providing awareness raising and counseling. Prevention is the major goal of our platform. Our AI informs policy makers to provide and create preventive policies and programs. Our serviceable obtainable market is at 900 million and our business model is B2B and B2G and depends on the market we launch in. This year, we're able to secure 1.1 million in revenues. Thanks to our go-to-market strategy and our global partnerships with UN agencies, major NGOs, U.S. State Department and four governments where Save You is currently live. This is a result of our impact on 35,000 women and 15,000 cases of violence addressed through our platform. But while we talk about impact, let's check back on Tamar. When we left her, she was physically abused by her husband, she was standing there with her daughter and she couldn't make any phone calls. But what she could do is suppress the Save You emergency help button. As her lawyer had suggested, she had Save You on her phone setting up the lawyer, a support NGO and the police as emergency contact and our ecosystem worked shortly after police arrived and arrested the criminal in a crime scene. Not only Save You did save two lives but the Save You audio recording was later used as a pivotal piece of evidence by court prosecuting the ex-husband for attempted murder sending him to jail where he remains to this day. So what if together with 2.5 million seed investment we can accelerate our US market entry, impact millions of lives and reach to 12 million revenue. I'm Mariam, founder and CEO of Save You and I welcome you to join us in this life-saving journey. Thank you. Thank you so much Mariam. Our next presenter, Kristen Kagetsu, is a 2018 fellow who is using her mechanical engineering background to improve access to sanitary products in India using climate-friendly sustainable materials through her company, Sathi. Please welcome Kristen. Administration is not a choice. 64% of women and girls in India don't have access to menstrual products. This is just one of the reasons we started Sathi. There are three key issues. The first is related to health. 60% of women and girls experience increased urinary tract infections and reproductive tract infections each year. The second is related to community. Almost 23 million girls drop out of school each year. The third is related to the environment. With only 36% of women and girls having access to menstrual products, this still means that there are 21.8 billion disposable plastic pads that enter the environment each year. At Sathi we have a holistic solution that includes not only how we thought about the life cycle of the product but also how we developed our business model and our supply chain to ensure that it has as much positive impact as possible. We're able to do this with our patented technology to convert agri-waste fibers into an absorbent material that allows us to make not only sanitary pads but other absorbent products as well. We have a high impact supply chain which starts with the farmer. We're able to source our raw materials from farmers which allows us to provide them additional income. We have an all women we have an all women staff in our manufacturing unit and we provide these pads to women in urban areas which helps subsidize them for women in rural areas. Because our products are biodegradable they can be upcycled into compost and at scale into biomass to energy as well as into biot toilets. We're addressing nine of the UN Sustainable Development goals and measuring six key impacts against these. We've increased income for farmers. We have we employ women not only in our manufacturing unit but also in our distribution activities. We've reached 40,000 women and distributed 2 million sanitary pads and we've we've avoided 36 metric tons of plastic waste and reduced 71 metric tons of CO2 emissions. There's a massive global opportunity valued at 20.5 billion dollars globally and 550 million dollars in India alone. We have global B2B and B2C distribution channels. Our global distributors have found us online and through articles and videos. We work with companies to provide these products to their staff. We work with CSR departments to ensure that we can reach local communities. We have a D2C model where we sell on our website and other e-commerce platforms and we've just launched a plastic avoidance program where we work with companies to create a model similar to carbon mitigation. These are our key achievements and milestones since we started Sati in 2015. We spent two years developing our product and had first sales in 2017. As of last year we distributed one million sanitary pads and this year we're working to set up a fully automated unit in order to become self-sufficient financially but also to reach many more women. This is our 18 month scale up plan where we have a six million dollar pipeline and are raising 1.8 million dollars to scale. In addition to scale up funding we're also looking for large volume suppliers as well as corporate partners to work with us to provide these products to staff to establish this new model for sustainable finance in terms of plastic avoidance and to work on additional ways to reach women and girls across the world through CSR. These are just some of the women and girls that we've impacted to date and we aim to make that millions more in the next couple years. Menstruation is not a choice but being eco-friendly is. At Tati we're ensuring that everyone has access to an experience that's eco-friendly period and we're helping the body community and environment one pad at a time. Thank you. Thank you so much Kristen. Our next speaker is Liv Anderson who is a 2023 fellow using her background in industrial ecology and her experience in construction to decarbonize the construction industry through her company Biozorok. Please welcome Liv. Hi I'm Liv Anderson founder and CEO of Biozorok. We use biotechnology to make hard things carbon negative. As an architect engineer and sustainability scientist I joined the construction industry to make it more sustainable but no matter how hard I worked how many solar panels I installed or how much insulation I added to reduce heating and cooling demands it was nowhere near enough to reach our climate targets. High emission materials like concrete made every major building I was part of designing caused the equivalent impact of hundreds of people's lifetime emissions it was clear that we needed a radical change because concrete is everywhere around us it is used in houses bridges roads hospitals dams flood defenses auditoriums and so much more it is the most used material on this planet after war which makes it responsible for 80% of our global carbon emissions that is roughly four times as much as the whole aviation industry but since concrete is strong durable fire resistant and cheap it is really hard to replace so at Biozorok we asked herself a very simple question how does nature do it? Nature has already figured out how to make strong durable materials like stone and marble that are carbon negative materials that last for centuries without costing the earth inspired by nature our patent pending process uses bacteria and circular waste to grow rocks this is similar to how corals grow in the oceans doing this in between sand and aggregates we organically cement them together creating a carbon negative material and the best part at scale this can be cost competitive to cement but concrete is just the beginning high value premium materials like stone and marble come at really high emissions due to the mining cutting grinding polishing processing and transportation that are associated with them since we are growing rocks we can generate profit in this premium space as we approach economies of scale to disrupt the broader concrete industry we are a team of engineers manufacturers biotechnologists and material scientists that was brought together by the Cambridge ecosystem we have been leading global construction projects we have taken new construction materials to market and we have been leading research at some of the best institutions in the country we're further supported by an international advisory board we have letters of intent and mo use with some of uk's largest manufacturers and construction companies we just secured a one million dollar grant from the uk government which forms part of our broader four million dollar seed grounds which we're raising right now we are bioceroc and we're using biotechnology to disrupt the construction industry if you want to know more come meet me at the networking events afterwards thank you thank you live our next presenter is kumal dadlani she is a 2015 fellow using her experience studying biochemistry as an inspiration to improve science education by transforming smartphones and their built-in sensors as scientific instruments through her company lab for you please welcome come on thank you very much hello everyone my name is kumal dadlani CEO and co-founder at lab for you and during my science education science was taught in a very theoretical way i studied biochemistry in Chile and it was full of formulas and not very experiential or not focused on development of skills and that's one of the reasons why i started lab for you to democratize science education and develop skills for the future of the workforce uh we know that there is an unmet STEM talent need when it comes to the future of the workforce on one hand corporations are in dire need of STEM talent but students lack interest in STEM more than 75 percent of the jobs of the future will be related to stem one way or the other but unfortunately only 20 percent of the students are prepared for STEM and we all know the data that backs the lack of diversity in STEM so we see that there's a two-sided struggle when it comes to STEM on one hand we have corporations that need this talent HR managers that need STEM talent pipeline CSR managers they're looking to engage with their communities and on the other hand we have schools that don't have the resources don't have labs students that are not interested in science so the solution is to bridge the gap between the educational needs and the future STEM jobs so what we are doing at lab for you is generating future STEM talent pipeline for corporations and providing employer branding and connecting corporations to schools by delivering educational STEM solutions that increase STEM interest in students so how are we doing that how are we increasing engagement in STEM in students in these communities we're doing it by turning smartphones into complete STEM science labs making science experiential and fun with built-in smartphone sensors like the camera the accelerometer the gyroscope you can see here how students in Latin America are actually experimenting and learning science through experimentation with more with our more than 150 experiments these are students from from schools in latam in Chile, Mexico, Colombia these are 8 000 students that we're working with they're actually experimenting you can see also here how they're calculating the concentration of a colored solution using the camera of the phone and our patented technology that uses computer vision and we also have branded labs to help students with career exploration like the physics of airplane with Boeing in Querétaro so they're actually experimenting with branded content with our corporate clients since we launched our corporate strategy we've increased our revenue we are on track for a million in revenue 6x ltv cac our business model is very simple corporations B2B SAS we implemented the schools in the community increased their STEM talent pipeline and give them opportunities opportunities for employer branding everyone's happy and we're increasing that STEM talent pipeline why do they choose us because we've got proven impact by a third party validated rct that shows that students increase their interest to pursue a STEM related career with us we're a talented diverse team looking to increase engagement in STEM we're raising our seed round and we would like to invite you to our seed round where we are planning to continue expanding we know that this is a growing market so we believe in the future of the STEM STEM talent force the next Einstein or Marie Curie can be anywhere in the world we want to give them the opportunity to have a lab in their pockets because the future of the workforce in STEM is here let's connect thank you very much thank you Kamal our next speaker is Tracy O'Rourke who is a 2019 fellow using her experience in international banking and aircraft leasing to deliver energy efficiency as a service to large corporates through her company vivid edge please welcome Tracy in Africa I've witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of climate on those who are least responsible and I imagine each and every one of you in the room today has been impacted or knows someone impacted by floods and forest fires we're working with those who most impact climate harm large and medium businesses most businesses are wasting 30 percent of the energy that they consume from inefficiencies it's costing them money solving this is the fastest first step towards net zero for them we work with businesses to help them find their energy waste and we deliver energy efficiency upgrades as a service using our capital our customers pay us a monthly service fee for 10 years that is more than covered by the energy savings so it's a self funding model the concept is simple but behind us is an innovative funding risk and pricing model based on my experience in international banking and an aircraft leasing unicorn and also we're different to other players in the market which are typically suppliers funding their own equipment and energy efficiency funds our technical expertise and comprehensive package sets us apart a multinational customer that we were working with was treating their building like a hotel we're basically leaving the lighting and the heating on all the time and their chiller was oversized by installing sensors and controls we were able to have their energy bill together with right sizing the equipment to understand the building properly you have to understand how all the different equipment work together we are a trusted advisor a trusted energy advisor and a one-stop shop for energy efficiency let's have a look at our revenue model so a typical project might be between $500,000 and half a million and we own the assets we have a project funding partner that provides the finance and then that pays our supplier we have a desk commitment with our project funding partner for 10 years it's fixed and we have fixed revenues from our customers so we have a fixed margin strong stable cash flows then we can do 10 locations for the same customer investors in the room you know how disaggregated the energy efficiency sector is we are an aggregator and this is a highly scalable model we've made some exciting progress we've got project funding facilities of 60 million lined up and there's more available for us our contracted revenue of seven million is set to be 21 million by next quarter and that will increase our a or or to three million once the projects are installed which might take about 12 months so we're here today to offer you the opportunity to invest in our business five million dollars in equity that will be spent on commercial and technical capability to deliver more projects and that will bring us to a three million a or or sorry a 30 million a or or in three years time and saving enough energy to power a million houses for a year and that's not all there is tremendous potential beyond this we believe this can be a one billion plus business imagine the impact that that could make so we invite you to be part of our journey my contact details are on the screen if you'd like to take a photograph and i look forward to hearing from you thank you thank you so much tracy thank you for your patience with me it's got a little lot of order here all right our next speaker is meg worth she is a 2011 fellow whose passion and mission is to eliminate maternal mortality through accelerating access to innovative medical technologies through her company matronova please welcome meg good afternoon we all have one burning question that haunts us for me that question is why in this day and age in 2023 why are women still dying in childbirth one every two minutes and in most cases we know the causes of death and we know affordable innovative solutions that could make the difference my name is meg worth and i am the founder of matronova why does it take in some cases decades for innovations medical innovation to spread across continents and boundaries i jumped into this issue by living in a maternity hospital in indonesia and working on women's health in the day we had an amazing project with an influx of talent education training and money and this this amazing intervention halfway through the project was going well until one day one of the objuvians on the project herself died in childbirth for me the whole world stopped spinning for a moment and i realized i had to approach this problem from a different perspective my presence there was not making a difference neither was the project making the kind of difference that i was seeking something was missing and so um these are some of the things that it turns out were missing i i began to work from a new perspective looking at innovative medical technologies that could leap frog health systems that could radically change the odds of death in childbirth what were the advances in medicine in maternal health and neonatal health that could save lives and more importantly how could they be pushed to the commercialization stage at scale and that was really the key i built a team as we figured out how the market functioned or in many cases how it malfunctioned we found out that it was not willingness to pay it was not ability to pay even in the lowest income markets and it wasn't for sure it wasn't the lack of innovation that pipeline was incredibly strong what was slow to function was the marketing the awareness the sales and the commercial transactions to get product a to point b we decided to change this with a dedicated e-commerce marketplace focused on accelerating maternal and newborn health innovation seemed very niche at the time it's brand driven and for profit did i mention that we've built matronova to find pre-qualify source and sell to hospitals nonprofits and governments around the world we work in a 44 billion dollar market it's not so niche after all and we are a for-profit company because we understand one thing our profitability is our key to scale specifically we look for innovative products like these shown here the non-ematic anti-shock garment an incredible device invented by nasa to stop hemorrhage the leading cause of death for women in childbirth these devices are like gold they can literally double the odds of surviving complications in childbirth like the complications that killed the opgyn in indonesia our business model is straightforward we find these technologies we negotiate exclusive terms and in some cases licenses on innovative devices and diagnostics and in return we take a margin on the product we know how to deliver anywhere in the world through our medical logistics team we are operational we have 50 skews in our catalog three million products have moved through our platform two million lives have been impacted already and we have 700 buyers from hospitals and governments us to napal from india to un from colombia to bolivia we have an exceptional team and experience across five continents with point five million annual arr we are proof of our place in the market you can still invest in matronova we have an open series a two-thirds subscribed and we invite you to speak with us about this incredible opportunity for sustainable scalable methods to save women's lives thank you thank you so much may last but certainly not least we have margaret magnesium she is a 2019 fellow and a 2023 jury member and she's using her 20-year experience in pharmacology and biochemistry to create new approaches for accelerating drug development to address incurable neurological diseases like ms parkinsons and Alzheimer's through her company ananda devices please welcome margaret hello everyone you must all be very inspired after such beautiful talks so my name is margaret mcdaysian and i thank you very much for being here and now with me today i would like to invite you to join us to join me in this mission to accelerate the development of drugs for patients with neurological diseases neurological diseases includes Parkinson Alzheimer's autism addiction and pain probably on your way to this event you have met several neurological disease patients on the streets of san francisco they are all over there waiting for a solution in fact there are 20 20 percent of the world population today suffer from a neurological disease and it started at a very early age where patients can be diagnosed with autism the incidence of neurological diseases is just increasing as we get older today one adult in five suffer from chronic pain daily or almost daily and as we age one in three seniors are going to die from Alzheimer's disease or another sort of a neurological disorder what can we do to help them those diseases have a huge impact not only in the patients but also in the family members and caregivers that have to give up their jobs and take care of their loved ones i know this story really well i was a caregiver for my mom and i went with her from one difficult treatment after the next without a positive outcome because there's no cure and there's no treatment for neurological diseases in fact 99.6 percent of all the drugs being tested today targeting neurological disorders will fail in clinical trials there's a lot of money invested in research that's not going to go anywhere most of those drugs are first tested in animals and then they're going to be tested in humans unfortunately animals do not naturally develop autism parkinson or multiple sclerosis as a result despite the use of over 100 million animals per year for neurological research we don't find a cure and we don't have any medication for our patients today can we imagine how much what's the impact can you imagine the environmental impact of 100 million animals per year and what can we do to help it what can we do to accelerate the development of drugs for those patients we have defined a solution after many years of research we came with this tool i brought a sample here for you basically it's a microplate this microplate can replace at least 30 animals and we can grow in those plates brains many brains from patients and immediately test how the drugs will affect the brains or the spinal cords of those patients so basically we take cells from patients we put in our plates we add the drugs and we can immediately say which patient is going to respond to the drug which patient will be harmed by the drug and which patient will benefit from the drug if you don't understand let's make an analogy how many of you have you have heard about the opioid crisis okay do you think it was the right drug for the right patient probably not otherwise they wouldn't be on the streets suffering right now so our technology has been already validated by key pharmaceutical companies in the market and i'm super proud that in september we brought two drugs with our technology in with our partner ucb forma as a result we got a contract with the FDA we are one of three companies in the world with a contract with the FDA to replace animal testing for neurotoxicity this can open for us a revenue opportunity of a hundred and twenty million dollars a year so now you can guess why i'm here we need to scale up our technology is amazing it saves costs it saves lives it saves human and animal lives and what i have i learned in all those years that i have been working in pharmacology and after so many years working with pharmaceutical companies the only thing i know is it's time to change there are 20 percent of the world population waiting for the right medication animal testing doesn't work and if it that take home message is that animal testing does not work and we need to help those patients besides the FDA modernization act was just signed by president biden in december last year and most pharmaceutical companies now no longer are requested to present data from animal testing so the space is there there's a huge market opportunity it's a 28 billion dollar market and we are ready to enter this market and lead neurotoxicity testing join us in this mission that's all i ask you to change the world for better delivering better and safer medications to patients we have the right technology we have traction with pharmaceutical companies and with the FDA the time is now the FDA modernization act just passed and we're looking for the right investors to help us scale up operations and sales we're we're raising a five million dollar round two million has been already secured join us thank you