Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Healthcare Technology |
Founded | 1 January 2011 |
Founder |
|
Headquarters | , |
Products | Embrace Nest, Embrace Care |
Website | embraceinnovations |
Embrace Innovations is an Indian healthcare technology company specializing in infant warmers. The company produces neonatal warming bags which are used to help reduce the risk of hypothermia in pre-term infants.
Embrace was founded in 2008 by Jane Chen, Linus Liang, Naganand Murty and Rahul Panicker. The four founders met as graduate students at Stanford University in a Design for Extreme Affordability course, where they were challenged to design an infant incubator that would cost 1% the price of traditional incubators (about $20,000 in the US). [1]
On a 2007 fact-finding trip to Nepal and India, the team realised their design would have to take into account the infrastructural challenges in developing countries, including unreliable power and limited skills of healthcare staff. An initial prototype was developed resembling a baby sleeping bag with a removable, heatable wax insert that prevented hypothermia in premature and low-birth-weight babies, which took into account the limitations of the developing country environment. [2]
With initial funding from Stanford BASES Social E-Challenge and Echoing Green, Embrace was registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2008. In 2009, the team moved to Bangalore, India to further refine their prototypes and explore their intended market. Clinical trials began in 2010. [3] The first Embrace infant warmer was delivered to Little Flower Hospital in Bangalore, India in April 2011, marking the launch of pilot programs in India. In late 2011, Embrace partnered with the American Refugee Committee and Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia to implement the first pilot program in Africa. [4]
In 2011, Embrace Innovations closed a Series-A funding round, with investments from Vinod Khosla's Impact Fund and Capricorn Investment Group. [5]
In January 2012, Embrace announced its new hybrid organisational structure, in which separate for-profit social enterprise, Embrace Innovations, was separated from the nonprofit Embrace 501(c)(3) organisation. The for-profit company would is tasked with handling product design, manufacturing, and sales/distribution, primarily to governments and private clinics in emerging markets. [6] Under the curren structure, the nonprofit owns the intellectual property for the company's products and is paid by the for-profit arm via royalties. each warmer sold, the for-profit arm pays a royalty to the nonprofit, which owns the intellectual property; these royalties are in turn spent on charitable functions such as the provision of infant warmers to under-resourced and impoverished communities. [7] According to the company, this combined approach "allows [Embrace] to divide and conquer, to reach a broader range of demographics and areas". [8]
The company produces two infant warmers called Embrace Nest, and Embrace Care. [9] Both utilize a sleeping bag style pouch for the infant and are designed to be used to complement the so-called "skin to skin" technique of infant warming. [10]
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of March 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $16.3 billion.
A business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services, starting with management training and office space, and ending with venture capital financing. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) defines business incubators as a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. NBIA categorizes its members' incubators by the following five incubator types: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and a combination of the above.
Social venture capital is a form of investment funding that is usually funded by a group of social venture capitalists or an impact investor to provide seed-funding investment, usually in a for-profit social enterprise, in return to achieve an outsized gain in financial return while delivering social impact to the world. There are various organizations, such as Venture Philanthropy (VP) companies and nonprofit organizations, that deploy a simple venture capital strategy model to fund nonprofit events, social enterprises, or activities that deliver a high social impact or a strong social causes for their existence. There are also regionally focused organizations that target a specific region of the world, to help build and support the local community in a social cause.
The phase-change incubator is a low-cost, low-maintenance incubator that tests for microorganisms in water supplies. It uses small balls containing a chemical compound that, when heated and then kept insulated, will stay at 37 °C for 24 hours. This allows cultures to be tested without the need for a laboratory or an expensive portable incubator. Thus it is particularly useful for poor or remote communities. The phase-change incubator was developed in the late 1990s by Amy Smith, when she was a graduate student at MIT. Smith has also started a non-profit organization called A Drop in the Bucket to distribute the incubators and to train people on how to use them to test water quality. Her “Test Water Cheap” system could be used at remote locations to test for bacteria such as E.coli.
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The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation was an office new to the Obama Administration, created within the White House, to catalyze new and innovative ways of encouraging government to do business differently. Its first director was the economist Sonal Shah. The final director was David Wilkinson.
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Jane Marie Chen is the co-founder of Embrace, a social enterprise startup that produces a low-cost infant warmer, that gives premature and low-birth-weight infants a better chance at survival.
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StartX is a non-profit startup accelerator and founder community associated with Stanford University.
Rahul Alex Panicker is a technology leader and entrepreneur, formerly Chief Innovation Officer at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and best known as the President and Co-founder of Embrace Innovations and Embrace, a social enterprise startup that aims to help premature and low-birth-weight babies, through a low-cost infant warmer.
Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
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