4 Egyptian startups awarded JICA's NINJA business plan competition

CAIRO - 29 March 2022:   Four Egyptian startups have been awarded the NINJA business plan competition, which was launched by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), to specifically promote businesses emerging in response to the COVID 19 pandemic. 

 

 

NINJA is short for “Next Innovation with Japan''

 

 

JICA elaborated in a statement that in Egypt, four startups were selected after a competitive selection process among 44 applications from startups in different sectors like health, education, fintech, training and agribusiness. These four startups were top ranked with high levels of expectations. 

 

JICA support is mainly focused on developing companies’ new business from one stage to the next. This includes support on various grounds including testing and validating the product, marketing, PR activities, business model development, linkages to investors, and so on, with the support of experts in each field, according to the statement.

 

 

“JICA, the Japanese governmental development agency, aimed at fostering innovation by collaborating with local startups to contribute to Sustainable Development Goals in various countries, including -but not limited to- Egypt,” it noted.

 

The business plan competition was participated by 19 African countries and 69 startups were selected to support pilot studies or Proof of Concept (POC) of new business models for the period of 6 months.

 

One of these startups is “Rology” the Egyptian E-Health Startup. 

 

The statement clarified that with radiology being one of only two ways to detect the coronavirus in patients, this has exacerbated the long delays in reporting times for radiology scans and made the problem of radiologists shortage felt more acutely than ever. 

 

“In order to solve the problem of shortage and help radiologists handle the substantial increase in radiological scans, a teleradiology platform is much needed that can remotely match radiology scans to radiologists and use AI models to triage the radiologists' workload and aid in the detection of Coronavirus in radiological-scans by using image-based AI-model,” it explained the role of Rology.

 

It added that a Rology startup stepped in and started to practice their role in the healthcare sector. After being awarded the NINA award from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Rology started the cooperation with JICA to further their ambitions in transforming the Coronavirus diagnosis with their new AI project. 

 

Moreover, in order to continue their ascending journey in supporting the medical sector with the on-demand teleradiology service that is helping almost 100 hospitals solve the problem of the shortage of radiologists in the Middle Eastern and African markets, by providing intelligent matchmaking between patients and remote radiologists from all over the world in a timely and efficient manner, Rology also changed the world’s perspective regarding coronavirus diagnosis with the NINJA project that will highly improve the speed and the productivity in detecting Covid-19 cases from the chest CT scan.