Ask HN: What are some startups working on big problems in the developing world?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796409

by refrigerator • 12 years ago

115 67 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

E.g. http://www.mobiusmotors.com

sehr• 12 years ago

Watsi! - https://watsi.org/

caser• 12 years ago

Engage Spark - http://www.engagespark.com/

Started by a serial entrepreneur from Boston, right now they're building tools to help NGOs reach people in abject poverty, and they have some really big ideas for the future.

They're based in the Philippines and actually are currently looking for developers to come over on 6-12 month fellowships to experience life there and contribute to the core product. If anyone is interested, I can link you to the relevant posting.

(not affiliated, just think what they're doing is awesome)

cinjon3• 12 years ago

Link to the relevant posting please?

worldadventurer2• 12 years ago

The Fellowship posting is here: http://www.engagespark.com/#jobs or the pdf directly: http://www.engagespark.com/files/jd-fellows-tech1.pdf

worldadventurer2• 12 years ago

Thank you for mentioning engageSPARK! Here's a quick summary of what we're building: Our first product empowers organizations to dramatically extend the reach and impact of their pro-poor programs. A not-for-profit business, we're building the easiest to use self-service cloud-based solution to easily and quickly launch comprehensive messaging, surveying, curriculums, and decision tree programs focused on developing countries via SMS, USSD and Voice Calls (roughly half of world’s poor are illiterate) in 200+ countries. engageSPARK will also be the first platform custom built for software developers in developing countries – they will utilize APIs to easily and quickly integrate into multiple telecoms across multiple countries for basic building blocks such as SMS, Voice, USSD, and Mobile Money. To understand the problems we’re solving, please read http://engagespark.com/blog/is-sms-really-solution-change-vo... .

AdamN• 12 years ago

OkHI is funded, has a great team and is rolling in Kenya:

http://www.okhi.com/

Their mission is to give everybody in the world an address. Something that people in the West take for granted, but isn't available for most of the globe's citizens. This is also a major opportunity business-wise of course and if I could invest, I would.

mhoad2• 12 years ago

As someone who spent the majority of this year living in Kenya I have to say that this was one of the weirdest things I had to adjust to. I was maybe living 10 minutes drive from the centre of Nairobi and no one could agree on what my actual address was. Directions were always given as references and as for receiving mail well good luck

egreenlowe• 12 years ago

This: http://what3words.com/about

is another very clever effort aimed at solving the same problem

andygcook• 12 years ago

Matternet - drone delivery network for small packages like medicine in the developing world where travel infrastructure may not exist.

http://matternet.us

dharma12• 12 years ago

I have wondered about these guys - drone deliver only really works for distances of a few miles.

Surely in most cases the distances are too long?

cinjon3• 12 years ago

Endaga: http://www.endaga.com/

"We built the first community cellular network in a rural village in Papua, Indonesia, in early 2013, with support from USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies. That first network is still running today, and today we continue to add new networks, constantly bringing connectivity to new users and communities worldwide."

Haven't met the rest of the team, but the CTO, Shaddi, is an awesome guy.

wittedhaddock• 12 years ago

Is this at all related to the Thiel Fellowship? So familiar!

cinjon3• 12 years ago

I don't know that there is a connection. What are you thinking of?

contingencies• 12 years ago

You seem proud. Slap yourself on the back from me, too. Such great work! And lay one on for Shaddi. What a dude.

Not.

This is ... centralized, US-led, heavily geopolitically partisan communications networks sold with vague economic development overtones. Any realistic evaluation would find it hard to conclude other than that such networks will chiefly be used to justify further US and Australian meddling (eg. extreme communications interception... such as the Indonesian president earlier this year) in this region.

Instead, we should lobby for FirefoxOS to drop cellular as de-facto and embrace alternate link-layers, ad-hoc and mesh! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047

kardan• 12 years ago

Akvo - http://akvo.org

Akvo helps people bring international development to life, online.

bjelkeman-again• 12 years ago

I work at Akvo. We build open source software which we run as a service. Our services are used primarily to combat poverty. We team up with hundreds of NGOs as well as UN organisations and country governments. We have a great team of 55+ people in fourteen countries, with hubs in Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, DC, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Delhi, Bangalore and Denpasar.

pandler• 12 years ago

Check out Eyenetra. http://eyenetra.com

I'm not directly associated, but one of my friends was an early employee who worked on some of the early prototypes and helped set up a location in India. They make a cheap (a few thousand dollars vs tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars) and compact (Read: portable) eye-exam device that interfaces with a smartphone for its camera and processor. Think of a traveling doctor bringing eye exams to patients in remote villages. Pair that with some of those cheap adjustable glasses (http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid...) and you've got a means for providing first-world eye care to the rest of the world.

I think the company is still based in Cambridge, MA.

diafygi• 12 years ago

Electricity is generally seen as going the way of telecommunications where it will skip a wired grid and go straight to wireless (in this case, distributed solar). Here's three startups I know are trying to make distributed energy happen in developing world:

1. http://angazadesign.com

2. http://powerhive.com

3. http://sunfunder.com

klunger• 12 years ago

Promethean Power Systems also fits in this category. For some reason their url is coolectrica though: http://www.coolectrica.com/

toufka2• 12 years ago

And another which is encouraging pellet stoves as safer and cleaner than paraffin or energy-hungry charcoal: http://www.africancleanenergy.com/

nudgeee• 12 years ago

Also Devergy: http://www.devergy.com

Building solar micro grids for remote villages in Tanzinia and Ghana. Amazing team and vision.

ratpik• 12 years ago

Check out Jana Care. http://janacare.com

The company is building a mobile based care platform for patients with diabetes or at risk of diabetes along with a Square equivalent device for diagnostics. While cost is one of the issue for patients, it is not the only one. Quality of care varies significantly across a city and the moment you step outside a major city, there is little to no specialized care for chronic conditions that need some form of training for managing the condition. A mobile phone with some form of internet connectivity is ubiquitous these days. So leveraging that to reach as many people as possible makes sense. There are over 80 million people with diabetes in India and another 80 million are expected to develop it over the next decade or so. Add to this the costs and quality of life of patients who have to suffer the complications (kidney failure, amputation, etc), and any improvements that can be made to these numbers with technology is worth the effort and makes business sense too.

The problem isn't India specific. China, US, Europe and the Middle East have similar or higher prevalence rates. It is just that India makes sense as a place to start doing things.

It's been a few years that we have been working on this. We mostly operate out of Bangalore but we have an office in Boston too. Feel free to drop by!

http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/no-answers-in-sight-for-ind...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-07/india-s-deadly-diab...

afarrell• 12 years ago

A friend of mine just joined Wave, building A tool for migrants to more reliably sending money back to their families : http://www.sendwave.com/

markessien• 12 years ago

http://Hotels.ng. 10,000 hotels in Nigeria and none of them online till we added them. Done 6000, another 20k or so left to go across the continent.

seunosewa• 12 years ago

How did you acquire all that data? (I think your website's responsive design implementation is fantastic, btw)

dharma12• 12 years ago

What is the most common form of payment in Nigeria for this type of stuff?

olalonde2• 12 years ago

I immediately thought of your startup when I read this post. Glad to hear it is still going strong.

poppingtonic• 12 years ago

Bitpesa: http://bitpesa.co

Based in London and Nairobi, they've built a Bitcoin-based service that enables migrants & expats to send money quickly and safely back to their relatives (called remittances in FinTech parlance). I'm not directly associated with them, but we've met many times at Nairobi's monthly Bitcoin meetup.

LAMike• 12 years ago

Bitcoin remittances are going to be huge... I wonder if stripe will undercut them with their flat 50 cent fee for Bitcoin to fiat

IkmoIkmo2• 12 years ago

Doubt it. Since when is their fee a flat 50c btw? Afaik they're free now (beta) and going live next month at 0.5%.

And let's not forget, they have a presence in North-America, Western-Europe and Australia. Not even e.g. Japan. And hell, they're in beta in all of those countries except five.

But more importantly, they're not a remittance company. So I really doubt we'll see a remittance product from them anytime soon.

But who knows. It's a legitimate business venture. If you can process a payment in bitcoin and pay out in a local currency and do remittance that way, you can process a remittance 'payment', too. The problem isn't really the technical or business part though, it's that it brings up a lot of KYC/AML responsibilities that facilitating retail shopping doesn't. So unless you want to really build out a remittance product, you can't just do something like this 'on the side'. And Stripe is way too focused on payments to jump into remittance properly anytime soon.

Especially when there aren't any deep liquidity pools for bitcoin in Africa (i.e. a lack of exchanges). Phillipines, India, all of that could feasibly happen soon (not by Stripe, but other companies), as liquidity does exist (and they're big remittance corridors), but undercutting Bitpesa anytime soon is unlikely. Bitpesa itself is already hustling to make this work with a local presence and its a bit of a mystery to me who their liquidity provider is atm.

IkmoIkmo2• 12 years ago

Do you have any idea of the type of volume / growth they're getting? They're definitely one of the most exciting bitcoin projects to me, but it's awfully quiet.

asmosoinio• 12 years ago

Gecko Landmarks - makes location based services work where addresses are not available and people cannot read maps. Basically a reverse geo-coding service that work everywhere and for everyone.

http://www.geckolandmarks.com/

wudf• 12 years ago

Jola Venture with ties between Boston and Cameroon is working on bringing modern innovations to rural and impoverished communities. They haven't scaled like a "Startup," but they operate like one. http://jolaventure.com

lmg643• 12 years ago

Driptech - http://www.driptech.com/

ultra low-cost irrigation systems

kiril-me• 12 years ago

Lookify.co http://www.lookify.co

Is search platform (as a service) for e-commerce websites to boost on-line sales through a complete and manageable integration. We are providing Amazon search experience for small/medium e-commerce web site. With advanced UI components and analytics.

The company is base in Riga, Latvia

okhudeira• 12 years ago

Pangea (http://gopangea.com) is looking to help the underserved communities send money. Generally, remittances are from high GDP to low GDP countries.

Pangea was part of the first class of Impact Engine (http://theimpactengine.com/), a for-profit social venture accelerator originally run by Chuck Templeton (found of Open Table).

balachandran_c• 12 years ago

http://www.gramvaani.org/

GramVaani provides crowdsourced news and other ICT4D services to the underserved.

unclesaamm• 12 years ago

Some interesting work coming out of the contractor space with IST research (http://istresearch.com/our-work/)

syedkarim• 12 years ago

Outernet https://www.outernet.is We're building a global broadcast data service to provide a basic level of news, information, and education for all of humanity.

vikp• 12 years ago

TulaLens -- http://www.tulalens.org

Yelp for low-income people in the developing world. They just did a pilot in Hyderabad (India), and helped pregnant women living in slum areas discover hospitals around them offering better, cheaper care then they were receiving elsewhere (some were having to pay bribes to get care at government hospitals).

fireismyflag• 12 years ago

Saving this awesome thread for future reference.

shermablanca• 12 years ago

Vuvuv

a_lubling• 12 years ago

Vayu - http://vayu2.brace.io/

My friend is the founder, working in Ann Arbor with an amazing group of aeronautical and electrical engineers, medical researchers, and others. They're building hardened VTOL drones to take medical supplies, samples, tests, back and forth from hospitals to rural India. They have a great team and deep relationships with the NGO and health sectors in India.

toufka2• 12 years ago

An open-source data collection system (census, health, economic, anything...) using apps on the ubiquitous non-smart phones: https://opendatakit.org/

darrenkopp• 12 years ago

http://devresults.com

We're working to help aid and development organizations gain better insight into how effective and where donor money is going, monitoring and evaluating organizational goals, and aggregating raw data into useful reports for both the organization and donors.

covercash• 12 years ago

I'd say YC darling http://watsi.org is a prime example of this! They're certainly one of my favorites in this space.

austinwm• 12 years ago

http://welldone.org - building a remote monitoring platform to improve the reliability and accountability of rural water infrastructure (for starters). Disclaimer: I'm the Executive Director of WellDone.

kal00ma• 12 years ago

Ona http://company.ona.io solves data collection problems for development organizations. Current clients are the WHO, UNDP, HNEC - Libya, World Bank, and UNICEF.

rickyci• 12 years ago

http://getmobilewise.com/ Mobile Wise is establishing a corps of Tech college graduates and young professionals who commit 6-12 months to empower citizens in developing countries on Digital Capability and we then provide employment opportunities to our fellows. We're currently running a pilot in Ivory Coast with the backing of Microsoft, promising so far!

mhoad2• 12 years ago

I actually moved to Kenya to help a friend setup a business there this year and had the good fortune of becoming involved with a number of NGOs of various sizes. One of the smaller startup style ones I was working with was http://www.earthenable.org where they are directly trying to bring down the child mortality rate dramatically by finding a really cheap and affordable way to ensure that families in Rwanda no longer have to live on a dirt floor (super prone to a lot of horrible diseases). They have some of the most impressive people I've ever met working on that project I seriously couldn't recommend them enough.

tomgruner• 12 years ago

We are working on T160K https://t160k.org/ which is crowdfunding sustainable and meaningful development in Africa by focussing on arts and culture. Another goal of the project is to promote a positive and vibrant image of African culture through our campaigns and messaging. One of our projects that initially got me excited about the idea is the Timbuktu Libraries in Exile https://t160k.org/campaign/libraries-in-exile/

gilesrhysjones• 12 years ago

What3words.com

We have addressed every 3x3m on the planet with 3 common words. More memorable, faster and less errors than alphanumeric systems. Currently in 8 languages with more including Swahili & Arabic coming. This could mean an address for the 4 billion unaddressed, as well as water points, schools, managing disease outbreaks.

More here: Vimeo.com/what3words/about.

I work for what3words.

mahmud• 12 years ago

This sounds amazing!

sahpa• 12 years ago

Finfo Technologies - is a web-based platform which provides company intelligence and fundamental data on publicly listed entities in Africa.

http://www.finfo.io

pcthrowaway• 12 years ago

I don't think it would be considered a startup, but Ushahidi is a global nonprofit worth looking into: http://www.ushahidi.com/mission/

csharpminor3• 12 years ago

TechChange (http://techchange.org) is building an online learning platform for training aid and non-profit workers in the developing world.

csharpminor3• 12 years ago

I should also mention that we're offering a paid internship/fellowship for college students this summer in Washington, DC. More information here:

http://techchange.org/fellowship/

redmattred• 12 years ago

Dimagi

dannyroberts1• 12 years ago

I work here and it's great. http://www.dimagi.com.

Dimagi's mission is to use technology to improve the lives of people living in underserved communities everywhere, especially through the use of mobile technology to strengthen programs in many sectors. Dimagi works in over 30 countries, mostly in the Indian subcontinent, Africa. The main product CommCare (http://www.commcarehq.org), allows for NGOs to write and maintain their own mobile applications without programming knowledge, and Dimagi also offers extensive consulting services with our partners as they start to introduce mobile software into their program. CommCare applications are geared toward usage by illiterate and low-literate users in sectors such as community health, clinical settings, agriculture, small business, infectious disease, maternal and child health, counselling for people in stigmatized and vulnerable professions, and can be used for many others; and the underlying software is repeatedly field-tested for usability in these settings. And it is awesome.

Dimagi has strong field teams around the world, with offices in Boston, Delhi, Cape Town, abd Senegal. All of Dimagi's core software developers also routinely spend weeks at a time at at project sites and shadowing a field manager, usually about twice a year per person. In my opinion, Dimagi is the most mature, on-the-ground, and innovative company of its type, but, hey I just work here.

MistahKoala• 12 years ago

I'm wondering if there's anything along the lines of 'Startups* Without Borders'?

*Or 'Innovators' or 'Technologists', if you prefer.

csharpminor3• 12 years ago

You might check out TechnoServe: http://www.technoserve.org/get-involved/volunteer

I believe some of their projects make use of technology, but it's more business/innovation oriented.

olalonde2• 12 years ago

There is "Engineers Without Borders" although I think they are more focused on traditional engineering disciplines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_Without_Borders

kevinburke• 12 years ago

Segovia is trying to make it easier for governments and NGO's to administer cash transfer programs. It's spun out of GiveDirectly (which is on Givewell's top rated charities list).

I met the team, pretty strong, might have worked for them but they didn't want engineers working remotely (they're based in NYC).

http://thesegovia.com/

valyats• 12 years ago

My friends' startup, Globein.com, connects artisans from the developing countries into a global economy. Kind of like Etsy, but for craftsmen from poor countries.

rtcoms• 12 years ago

Milaap Social Venture https://milaap.org

It is like Kiva , but we crowdfund loans mainly for basic needs of people eg. sanitation(build toilets), water connection, education, enterprise development, energy (solar connection in remote areas) in India

Recently we launched a platform for crowdfunding donations for causes and social initiatives. https://milaap.org/open

Disclosure : I work at Milaap as a senior developer

buildops• 12 years ago

Check out Zolair Energy -- it aims to get cheap energy into Africa and the rest of the developing world, based on zinc air batteries. Founded by some of my MBA classmates http://zolair-energy.com/

CXY035• 12 years ago

Education: http://www.rumie.org/

Rumie is a Canadian non-profit who makes $50 tablets containing built-in educational contents to make education more accessible for kids from the developing countries. These tablets have a long battery life and they only need to be connected to the Internet once every couple of months to update the content.

I believe they're also working on creating a community to produce more open sourced educational content for kids. They also don't go out and "sell" their product; they only work with organizations who come to them believing that the tablet is suitable for the intended community.

I'm not affiliated with them but learned about them at a conference last year and thought what they were doing is pretty awesome. I could've remembered some details wrong though so check out their site yourself.

Ask HN: What are some startups working on big problems in the developing world?

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