The 4D Healthware team, investors, and advisors are behind a singular mission, to give physicians the power to improve their health and save the lives of millions of patients with chronic illnesses. Each one in a team has been touched by chronic illness either directly or has dealt with it in an immediate family. The founder and CEO, Star Cunningham has been dealing with multiple chronic illnesses since she was a child. It was her own frustration with the healthcare system’s inability to appropriately diagnose, treat and coordinate her care that led to the creation of this enterprise. Her background at IBM providing smart data solutions to global clients and leading their implementation gave her deep insight into the power of data and emerging technology. She left IBM to apply that knowledge and experience where it’s needed most, to a fragmented and dysfunctional health delivery system.
Star’s vision inspired all of the members of a team to join her on this journey, bringing individual skills and experience together to solve this monumental problem. Now the team is in this to save lives.
Affectiva
Affectiva spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009 and is backed by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Horizon Ventures, Fenox Venture Capital, and WPP. Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard, who co-founded Affectiva, are the pioneers of affective computing. Rana is Affectiva’s CEO and Rosalind heads up the Affective Computing group at MIT Media Lab.
Affectiva is focused on advancing its technology in key verticals: automotive, media, audience and customer analytics, social robotics, and, through its partner iMotions, human behavioral research. Affectiva is no longer making its SDK and Emotion as a Service offering directly available to new developers. Academic researchers should contact iMotions, which has its technology integrated into its platform.
Blendoor
Blendoor has deep expertise in data science, people analytics, and financial risk modeling combined with a passion for ushering standards and building solutions that facilitate environmental, social, and governance advancements. According to Glassdoor: 76% of job seekers and employees today report that a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating companies and job offers. A long-term strategy must incorporate ESG. Millennials increasingly want to work for companies that effectively balance people, the planet, and profitability.
Stephanie Lampkin, CEO, Stephanie had a humble start en route to becoming Fortune 40 under 40, MIT Tech Review 35 under 35, internationally acclaimed data scientist, and thought leader in the DEI and people analytics space. You can see her speak at the NY Times, Wharton, and TEDx. She has navigated an 18-year career in tech, building and managing enterprise software solutions at companies like Microsoft, TripAdvisor, Deloitte, and Blendoor. Despite earning degrees from both Stanford and MIT, Stephanie has faced immeasurable bias over the course of her career in gaining entry-level opportunities at tech and VC firms. As a former slalom ski racer, Stephanie sees barriers like gates, not walls; she goes around them or through them, but not finishing is not an option. As such she has committed her entire life to eliminating market inefficiencies that limit opportunities for talented people and innovative firms.
Biobot Analytics
Global leaders in wastewater epidemiology. Its mission is to transform wastewater infrastructure into public health observatories. Founded by a biologist and an architect, the team has exemplified the power of interdisciplinary collaboration from its beginning. As a first-year Ph.D. student at MIT, Dr. Mariana Matus was inspired to start wastewater epidemiology research, so she could apply her technical skills to improve public health. With the support of Professors Eric Alm and Carlo Ratti, her research grew into the MIT Underworlds Project. Newsha Ghaeli, an urban studies researcher, joined the project with an interest in how new technologies can improve cities and urban life. The two led Underworlds for three years, working with the cities of Cambridge, Boston, Kuwait City, and Seoul. Their work resulted in Dr. Matus’ Ph.D. dissertation in Computational Biology, several scientific publications, and coverage by dozens of local and national media outlets.
Inspired by the potential of wastewater epidemiology, Biobot is the first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage. After winning multiple entrepreneurship competitions at MIT, including a place in the DeltaV and DesignX accelerators, Biobot completed the Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco. Headquartered in the Boston area, it aims to extend a wastewater epidemiology platform across all five continents.
Cake
Cake believes everyone’s values should be honored at every stage of life. “Cake” in the spirit of celebrating life and appreciating our unique values. The goal of the organization is to empower people to live in accordance with their values all the way to the end. This can only happen if we know our end-of-life preferences and share them with our loved ones. Presently, fewer than 1 in 4 people have an advance care plan in place. Cake use technology to make it easier to discover and share your preferences.
Suelin Chen, CEO- For years I worked in the healthcare sector and would find myself daydreaming about what could be done to make it better. I kept coming back to end-of-life care as being an area that had so much room for improvement. After all, we will all die one day, and we all experience loss multiple times throughout our lives–it is so crazy to me that this universal thing we all experience is something we reflect on so rarely and communicate about so poorly.
“I believe it doesn’t have to be so, and that something shrouded in so much negativity can be turned into a positive force. We can all live a better, more empowered life with a few simple steps to celebrating the past and embracing a clearer future.”-Suelin Chen, CEO
ClickMedix
ClickMedix is global mobile health (mHealth) social enterprise founded by faculty and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie Mellon University to increase the capacity of physicians and health organizations to serve more patients. By enabling existing medical experts to serve more patients, the following global healthcare challenges can be addressed:
- Lack of access: Patients cannot easily reach doctors.
- Lack of funds: Patients cannot afford the high cost of healthcare, and governments/NGOs are unable to subsidize under-served populations entirely
- Lack of medical resources: Most countries face severe shortages of trained healthcare professionals, especially medical specialists
Ting Shih, Founder, and Chief Executive Officer, as the founder of ClickMedix, Ting uses her decade of experience in designing and launching technology services, along with associated business strategies for US government, pharmaceutical, and global education organizations, to build ClickMedix from an idea in an MIT classroom to a global enterprise. Her areas of expertise include innovation strategy, product development, Lean/Six Sigma process improvement, operations management, organization change management, and business development.
Kinside
Universal access to quality child care for all working parents. Kinside launched out of Y Combinator to tackle the single most stressful part of being a working parent in the modern world: child care. Kinside is guided by the principle that all families and kids deserve access to high-quality care.
The founders are experts in organizing outdated industries, facilitating payments, and the benefits space. Kinside CEO, Shadiah Sigala, cofounded and scaled the late-stage tech company HoneyBook, where she intentionally designed a culture supportive of working parents. The CTO, Abe Han also held a role at HoneyBook as a lead engineer where he launched the network product. Brittney Barrett, Head of Marketing has over ten years of experience innovating outdated industries and scaling early-stage startups. She is a branding, digital marketing, and growth expert having led Business Development at Honeybook and running Digital Marketing at OUAI Haircare. Together, Kinside is a parent on a mission.
Lia
Lia is changing the industry by reengineering the at-home pregnancy test, Lia has made it good for women and better for the future of our earth. Lia is working to modernize and humanize female reproductive health and wellness — once and for all.
Cofounder Bethany Edwards- Our story began with a vision: to create a better experience for women during one of the most emotional moments of their lives. As women with a passion for reproductive health and deep roots in product design and engineering, we couldn’t help but recognize the frustrations of the modern-day pregnancy test. If you don’t want to be pregnant, it’s normal to be riddled with anxiety about someone sneaking a peek at that oh-so-personal piece of plastic. If you do want to be pregnant, a negative result is heart-wrenching, while positive result ushers in one of the biggest announcements you might ever make – one that should be yours, and only yours, to reveal.
Add to that the amount of unnecessary plastic waste polluting our planet, and it became clear. We didn’t just want to create something better. We had to.
Mamava
Mamava is a business dedicated to transforming the culture of breastfeeding. Its goal is to raise the profile of breastfeeding by celebrating the realities and logistics involved for the many mothers who need to be away from their babies.
Cofounders: Sascha Mayer and Christine Dodson- It was Labor Day 2006. The New York Times featured an article written by Jodi Kantor that outlined the challenges certain mothers faced trying to continue breastfeeding after returning to work. This article struck a chord and the seed was planted. After having pumped at trade shows, airports, corporate retreats, baseball games, and even the back seat of a male client’s car, we decided enough was enough. This project was motivated by our personal experiences as working, nursing moms, and by all the friends and colleagues and the thousands of women who have shared their experiences and frustrations with us.
With the motto that nursing should be a right, not a privilege, we started ideating out of the graphic design studio where we both worked, Solidarity of Unbridled Labour (formerly JDK). With the creative, problem-solving minds of design and brand strategists and the generous resources of the studio, the early concepts of what eventually would grow into Mamava slowly came to life. After years of prototyping—and a big structural win for breastfeeding support that came with the amendment of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 2010—we officially launched Mamava in 2013.
