Lily Health

Lily is a AI powered chatbot delivering reproductive health advice to millions of women in emerging markets via personalized conversations.

Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information is a universal right. Unfortunately, “millions of people, mainly women and young people, especially girls, continue to be denied this human right largely due to stigma and discrimination.”(UNFPA) 

Lily is a mobile chat service that works on any mobile phone, over SMS or other messaging platforms. This makes Lily extremely accessible but also private and discrete so users are comfortable asking questions.

Lily is delivered in the form of a human conversation, not by clicking on buttons or choosing options. Keeping the interaction just like you were chatting with a friend enables Lily to build a trusted relationship with each user. The relationship makes the user comfortable sharing information, which enables Lily to give more and more relevant advice.

Lily is built on scalable technology that have the potential to reach millions of women. AI and Behaviour Design enables Lily to build relationships with these millions of women. So in the end we not only send out information but we give relevant advice that actually helps each user.

We have already seen the impact of these among the over 2,000 women that has used the service so far:

• 70% of users say Lily helps them achieve their reproductive health objective
• 96% feel more confident
• 86% have learned something new
• 100 net promoter score

Lily is built on the conviction that health advice is best delivered though a conversation with someone that you trust and is comfortable with. 

Scaling up a conversation has previously been difficult. Face-to-face and phone conversations have many limitations. But the mobile phone revolution, messaging platforms and Artificial Intelligence are now enabling a conversations that scales to millions of users. 

Lily keeps an ongoing conversation with each user to learn more about her menstrual, sexual and reproductive health. And over time Lily goes from being seen as a service to being seen as a trusted personal advisor.

Lily is a mobile chat service that works on major messaging platforms such as SMS and Facebook Messenger. This enables anyone with a mobile phone to communicate with Lily.

At the heart of Lily is the system that keeps track of the conversation history with each user. The more a user has chatted with Lily the better advice Lily can give that user, both in terms of timing and relevance. This system is a combination of a database and AI to decide what message should be sent to each user.

Build fully scalable platform.

Full product launch in three markets.

500,000 active users.

Our goal is to positively impact 1 billion people either directly or indirectly.

Lily also has positive impacts on the welfare of families by supporting women in timing pregnancies.  Lily users also share information they learn from Lily with other women.

By continuing to grow the absolute number of Lily users we will continue to scale impact.

Initially we use digital channels (such as google search optimization and facebook ads) to reach users.   As the user volume grows we plan to transition to referral models as well as more traditional marketing like radio and on-the-ground promoters.

We have 2000 active users.

Based on customer surveys of existing users after three months of use:

- 70% of users say Lily helped them achieve their reproductive health objectives (like getting pregnant, preventing pregnancy, staying healthy during pregnancy)

- 96% of users say Lily helps them feel more confident

- 86% of users say they learn something new from Lily

We will be serving 500,000 users in 12 month and over 10 million within 36 months.

Based on customer surveys of existing users after three months of use:

- 70% of users say Lily helped them achieve their reproductive health objectives (like getting pregnant, preventing pregnancy, staying healthy during pregnancy)

- 96% of users say Lily helps them feel more confident

- 86% of users say they learn something new from Lily

We thus expect to have positive effects on most future users within three months of their first use of Lily.

MacGregor Lennarz and Emil Sjoblom have experience building and growing mobile money services and other mass market mobile services in low and middle income countries.

Suha Patel is a board certified obstetrician/gynecologist and public health professional. Her speciality is building innovative approaches to improve the health of women in limited-resource settings.

Their combined backgrounds will ensure collaboration with mobile network operators for SMS delivery as well as successful mass market role out in low and middle income countries and product market fit optimization.

The revenue model is subscription based where the customer pays from their mobile airtime account or through mobile money (M-Pesa). The user is debited a small amount for each message they receive from Lily.

The average monthly revenue per user for customers in the Kenya pilot is $.64 but this is likely to change based on the country and income segment. 

We believe Solve can advance our work by raising our visibility with, and potentially connecting us with, individuals or organizations that work on artificial intelligence (specifically natural language processing) to advise us on our technology strategy.

As mentioned above, we will need to increase our use of artificial intelligence to make the product more scalable. This includes support for big non-english languages in key markets as India, Bangladesh and Africa.

We will also need funding to acquire customers at scale. Many organizations are already out educating and supporting women on reproductive health, and Lily would work well with continuing the conversation and answer questions after the face-to-face interaction.