Jaza Rift Ventures
Villgro Africa, Bishop Magua Building Off George Padmore Street, Nairobi, Kenya
Overview
Jaza Rift Ventures invests in the most innovative and invention-based healthcare firms at the pre-seed, seed, and series A stages. Jaza Rift Ventures is a healthcare venture capital firm that invests in innovative early-stage entrepreneurs including healthtech, medtech, and biotech businesses.
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Intron Health
Participated · Seed · Jul 2024
Intron Health builds clinical speech-recognition technology tailored to African accents and medical vocabulary, and can integrate with existing EMRs. Its algorithm is trained on 3.5 million audio clips (16,000 hours) from over 18,000 contributors across 29 countries and 288 accents, primarily from healthcare practitioners. The tool is live in 30 hospitals across five markets, including deployments in Kenya and Nigeria, and has been shown to cut radiology-result wait times in one West African hospital from 48 hours to 20 minutes. The company plans technical improvements including better noise cancellation, low-bandwidth performance, multi-speaker transcription and text-to-speech, and aims to add decision-support/clinical-intelligence tools for prescriptions and lab tests. Intron was launched in 2020 and is also engaged in speech-research partnerships with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH to evaluate LLMs across 15 countries. The startup raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round to support product development and expansion.
- Figorr
Participated · Seed · May 2023
Figorr builds IoT-powered devices that are placed inside cold-storage setups to collect temperature, humidity and location data; the devices are provided at no cost while customers subscribe to access the data. The company pivoted from mobile solar-powered storage boxes after launching in 2019 and doubled down on the IoT component in 2020. Figorr’s solutions are used across healthcare (vaccines, insulin) and agriculture/horticulture, and the startup says its devices are deployed in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. It is expanding outside Nigeria and recently entered Kenya to tap agricultural demand. Figorr is developing a risk‑management platform, due before year-end, to give insurers the dataset needed to offer tailored perishables insurance products. Financially, the company raised a $1.5M seed and has so far raised $1.7M in equity funding plus $275,000 in grants from several programs.
Team
No current team members are available.