Nabta Health

Sophie Smith is the Co-founder and CEO of Nabta Health, a Hybrid Healthcare company for women headquartered in Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park.

Prior to co-founding Nabta, Sophie worked for Accenture as a technology consultant and then founded several impact enterprises including myZindagi (a doctor-finding platform based in Pakistan) and Le Plastics (a plastic recycling company based in Sierra Leone).

Sophie’s lifetime ambition is to make healthcare affordable and accessible for all women. 

Sophie read History at the University of Cambridge and completed an MBA with Quantic School of Business and Technology.

The growing epidemic of NCDs threatens the ambition of countries around the world to achieve sustainable, universal access to healthcare and universal health coverage for their populations.

NCDs such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease account for 71% of deaths each year despite the fact that they are lifestyle diseases and so are largely preventable. They are also responsible for the increasing prevalence of infertility in society.

Our Hybrid Healthcare model allows women to identify, manage and prevent NCDs impacting from their fertility quickly, effectively and cheaply using a combination of fertility tracking and monitoring, at-home testing, virtual consultations and a machine-learning driven personal assistant named Aya.

By empowering women to effectively manage their own health and solve their biggest health problems - with privacy, autonomy, convenience, and at a much lower cost - we have the opportunity to make cutting-edge healthcare accessible and affordable for all women.

Nabta is initially focusing on the diagnosis of infertility due to Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) as the first of several personalized care pathways powered by machine learning.

An estimated 320 million women suffer with PCOS globally, although 70% of all PCOS cases are mis- or undiagnosed. Nabta’s aim is to reduce the time it takes women to arrive at a diagnosis of PCOS from an average of two and a half years to three months. 

In addition to this, Nabta aims to address, through targeted content and a series of specific D2C and B2B2C awareness campaigns, the three problems that have been identified as contributing to the delays associated with diagnosing PCOS and related fertility issues:

(i) Lack of clinician knowledge and training;

(ii) Lack of properly defined and nuanced diagnostic processes.

(iii) Lack of consumer awareness.

Once Nabta has achieved the required clinical outcomes associated with this first pathway, it will apply the same model of Hybrid Healthcare, centered around machine learning and precision medicine, to pathways associated with Prenatal and Postpartum care.

Nabta’s Hybrid Healthcare model involves (i) analyzing existing care pathways to identify the key pain points for women who are trying to conceive, i.e. points at which a user gets “stuck” and cannot find a medical solution, and (ii) identifying digital health components that could be used to address and eventually eliminate those pain points.

The objective of Nabta’s first care pathway is to enable women to arrive at a diagnosis for PCOS in less than 90 days.

Initially, Nabta is working with third party digital health products and third party healthcare providers to keep its costs low and prove that Nabta’s model of Hybrid Healthcare is superior to traditional healthcare. Once the model is proven, Nabta will develop its own digital health products and its own healthcare ecosystem.

The predictive analytics built into Nabta’s platform will continuously evaluate and re-evaluate the clinical outcomes of women on the platform against clinical outcomes off-platform, and will use this analysis to refine and enhance the recommended trajectory for each individual user along the care pathway.

Nabta aims to empower women to view and use their own bodies as their primary source of good health and wellbeing. 

In the long term, Nabta aims to reduce women’s dependencies on drugs and other medical interventions - for example, through the use of Prescription Digital Therapeutics (PDTs) rather than traditional drug-based therapies - and recommend diagnostic and treatment options to women that prioritize value-based care over commercial incentives.

Nabta’s broad target market is women in MEASA (Middle East, Africa, South Asia) between the ages of 14 and 58. Nabta’s first hybrid care pathway will be focused on women between the ages of 18 and 42 who fall into one of two categories:

I - women with confirmed PCOS;

II - women who have been trying to conceive for more than six months without success.

Nabta improves healthcare delivery and diagnostics for women, lowering barriers to seeking care, including stigma.

Because Nabta is proudly by and for the MEASA region, all of Nabta’s product offerings as well as its content and guidelines have been designed to uphold the unique cultural, linguistic and religious considerations of the region. 

Often a woman's value is attached to her ability to conceive and deliver healthy children for her family. Nabta was founded on the belief that the key to empowering women is to give them access to the knowledge and tools to manage their fertility on their own terms.

After I moved to Dubai in Sep-16, I reconnected with a friend after I went to speak at a conference he was organising on diabetes in Kuwait. At the time, I was consulting on NCDs in the context of HealthTech and was five months pregnant, and we got chatting about women’s health. 

My friend, and soon-to-be co-founder, Dr. Mussaad Al-Razouki, alerted me to the fact that women in the Middle East have some of the worst health stats of anywhere in the world - 80% of breast cancers are diagnosed at Stage 4; 40% of women don’t attend a single antenatal appointment. One month later, he called and asked if I’d be interested in setting up a company to address the gap in women’s health in the Middle Eastern market. I said yes. 

We founded Nabta on 21st March 2017 with the aim of empowering women in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia to take control of their health at vital stages in their lives with privacy, autonomy and convenience. Since then, our third co-founder, Dr. Saba Alzabin, has joined us to lead our R&D and spearhead the “discovery” element of the work that we do in women’s health.

I've had various health issues at different points in my life, so when an acquaintance on the HealthTech circuit approached me midway through my first pregnancy about setting up a women's healthcare business focused on emerging markets, I knew immediately that this was it, this was the company that I was going to spend the rest of my life running, making that lasting, positive impact.

We pivoted from a digital-only healthcare platform to a Hybrid Healthcare model in July 2018 after I was diagnosed with insulin-resistant Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. I had been using our fertility monitor for 6 months and knew I wasn’t ovulating, but it wasn’t until I had the blood test in a clinic and was given a hormone shot that I received the formal diagnosis and was able to conceive. 

This experience made me realise that if we wanted to solve problems for women - really solve those problems - we needed to combine digital AND traditional healthcare to improve health outcomes.

From a skills perspective, I have a background in digital and health technologies - through Accenture, where I worked as a technology consultant in enterprise-level implementations for 4 years, and through my earlier companies which were all focused on tech. I also have an MBA through the Quantic School of Business and Technology.

From a motivation perspective, having a positive impact on women and women’s health is my passion - as a woman who has experienced multiple health issues, and as a woman who encounters conscious (and unconscious) bias each and every day. All of the 23 full-time members of our team have similar anecdotes, and all are similarly motivated to change the landscape of women's healthcare for the better.

Through Nabta, and our corporate culture and code of honour, we have the opportunity to set a good example by (i) creating equal opportunities in terms of access, education and resources, and (ii) empowering women with jobs that offer flexible working options and support at every stage of their lives.

When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, all of our partners in the healthcare sector - hospitals, clinics, labs - went into crisis management mode and effectively took themselves offline. 

As a result, we had to push back the launch of Nabta Care - our medical encounters app - to July 2020 and adjust our fundraising plans accordingly. What was due to be a 5M USD Series A in June became a 1.8M Pre-Series A in July and a 20M Series A in July. We shelved all B2B business / product development activities for 12 months and adjusted our revenue forecasts accordingly. We brought our testing in-house. 

To support our users during the pandemic, we added ML-powered Covid-19 risk and symptom assessments to the Nabta app and are currently in discussions with academic institutions in the UK to launch home antibody tests for Covid-19 in the UAE, alongside our existing suite of tests. 

We adapted. We survived.

Two months ago, my Executive Assistant (Jinky)’s brother, with whom she shares a studio apartment, was diagnosed with Covid-19. We invited Jinky to stay with us for two weeks in our spare bedroom, to allow her brother to self-isolate as advised.

Jinky became symptomatic four days later and was admitted to hospital, where she stayed for two and a half weeks, before being discharged Covid-free. We brought her straight back to live with us until her apartment had been sanitised. I also developed symptoms a couple of days after Jinky but, as a low risk individual, remained at home. My two children and husband did not develop symptoms. 

Looking back now, I would not change a thing. We are all low-risk in our household. Jinky is high risk. Sure, it meant we had to live under stricter quarantine for two weeks, but I would sacrifice freedom any day to ensure that a member of our family, and the Nabta Health family, felt safe, loved and cared for.

We are here to empower and support women with their health after all, through good times and bad. If we can’t support our own, what really are we doing here?

We are pioneering an entirely new model of Hybrid Healthcare - combining digital health and traditional healthcare on a care pathway by care pathway basis to improve specific sets of health outcomes for women.

We are addressing underlying biases in healthcare and health technologies that negatively affect health outcomes in women. For example, there is not a single wearable device on the market that has been accurately configured to count steps in women who are pushing buggies.

We are addressing issues of healthcare accessibility and affordability in emerging markets through our Hybrid Healthcare model, and are building a solution for a demographic that is still, today, discriminated against and excluded from clinical trials and clinical research in more developed markets.

Our model is innovative, but so is our target market and execution.

By educating women about their health - in their native language, in a format that is accessible to them, and at key stages in their lives - we show them that they can take ownership of decision-making relating to their wellness, health and medical encounters.

By providing women with tools that prioritise their needs - privacy, autonomy, convenience - and are available in an accessible (technology-enabled) and affordable format to support them with that decision-making, we make high quality, evidence-based healthcare available to a greater number of women.

By meeting the physiological and safety needs of women (according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs), we free them up to think about the higher tiers - love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation - and so unlock the intellectual, emotional and socioeconomic potential of millions of women around the world who, today, are too caught up in the simple act of survival.

Currently serving 250,000 women per month (and have reached 18 million across MEASA with health awareness campaigns since Jan 2018, in Arabic and English).

Will be serving 1.2 million women per month in 1 year's time.

Will be serving 25 million women per month in 5 years' time.

In the next year: We will complete the launch of our first care pathway in the UAE and raise a Series A to take it MENA-wide. We will begin work on our second care pathway (focused on Type 2 Diabetes). We will open our Hybrid Healthcare Research Institute in the UAE with technical and clinical research labs to support new discoveries in hybrid healthcare / women's health.

In the next five years: We will establish ourselves as the trusted global leader in women's health.

Capital - we are the only women-led HealthTech company in the UAE, and the only HealthTech company in the region that is specifically focused on women's health. Our model of hybrid healthcare is also new to the region, so while we have won many prizes for innovation, we have struggled to date to raise capital for an "off-piste" concept. That said, we still managed to successfully close a Seed round of 500K USD, and are now raising a Pre-Series A of 1.8M USD.

Resilience, and leveraging the region's new appetite for investment into life science, healthcare and population health / security in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

We are partnered with local (vetted) healthcare providers to support with consultations through the platform.

We are partnered with various academic institutions including the American University of Sharjah, Imperial College, Manchester University, and others, to support us with specific R&D collaborations.

We are partnered with Eurofins for our home tests.

We are partnered with the Al Ghurair Foundation, which sponsors local (MENA-based) STEM scholars through university for internships / full-time hires.