Q&A: Zenysis Technologies' Jonathan Stambolis

Zenysis Technologies was established in 2015 by Jonathan Stambolis, formerly a health advisor to the UN, and Ian Webster, a software engineer who previously worked for NASA. The company entered Y Combinator’s accelerator program in 2016 and has raised around $7 million in funding. 500 Startups invested in Zensys through its Southeast Asia fund based on the company’s focus on emerging markets. It now works with nine countries in Africa and four in Asia. New projects are under development with three more Asian nations. 

Q: What are the problems with existing healthcare management systems?

A: Before we came along there was no organization, just fragmentation, and that remains the norm. Every government has multiple systems for specific functions like collecting routine health information, surveillance data via laboratories, supply chain data, human resources data, and finance data. All these vertical systems have been put in place at different times and it is very rare that they will talk to each other. The coronavirus outbreak is a perfect illustration of what happens when decision-makers can’t see a complete picture of what is going on. By bringing data sources into a single analytical view, they can interact with information in a frictionless way and harness all data to improve decision making. Companies like Palantir Technologies solve this problem for high-income countries. We have focused up to now on developing countries that would never be able to afford those kinds of solutions. Our mission is to make that technology available to every public institution in the world that may require it.

Q: The 2013-2015 Western African Ebola crisis was what led to the company being established…

A: I was at the UN at the time and saw how unprepared countries were to deal with a pandemic emergency. It wasn’t just West Africa, there were some cases of transmission in the US from people who were medically evacuated from West Africa. At one point, the UN Security Council declared the Ebola virus the biggest threat to international peace and security since the Second World War. It was a dramatic illustration that very few countries had the tools to stop an outbreak like that. Coronavirus is further proof of that because it’s now in more than 170 countries. The inability to generate testing data, to conduct contact tracing and real-time surveillance, and to integrate surveillance data with supply chain data so we can balance demand and supply for things like ventilators and PPE [personal protection equipment] – all of these things have contributed to very severe outbreaks in high-income countries. Zenysis was created in anticipation of this moment. The advantage of a technology-driven approach is that technology is scalable, and it works at light speed. We need this because it’s a minute-by-minute fight to save lives.

Q: How can you make systems sophisticated and affordable?

A: By the time the company was created a lot of the technology that supports big data, cloud computing, and distributed computing had been built and open-sourced. You can’t just airdrop that on low- and middle-income countries, so we had to do a lot of development, but we had a lot to work with. We could stand on the shoulders of giants and use our resources to focus on things that had never been accomplished anywhere else. In one country we used machine learning to generate high-resolution malaria forecasts for over 800 individual districts with an accuracy of plus or minus 5%. We aren’t aware of a predictive algorithm that has exceeded those performance attributes. One thing we optimized for in the beginning was the caliber of engineering talent. We have accomplished a lot in a short period of time because we hired people from Amazon, Microsoft, and NASA. At the same time, technology alone is not enough to effect change. What Zenysis does is combine the power of diplomacy with the power of information technology. If you can’t get access to the country, the decision-makers, and the data, it doesn’t matter what technology you have built. 

Q: What has been the impact of COVID-19 on business 

A: What has been eye-opening for me in the last few weeks is seeing the line between poor and rich countries be totally erased by coronavirus. Before the outbreak, we had 11 clients and we’ve added two in the last two weeks. We have helped them create emergency operations centers – virtual control rooms that integrate all the data on the outbreak and the response. We have seen a surge in demand from low and high-income countries in the past three weeks, about 24 in total. Some of our investors are talking to us about a fundraise so we can bring countries online even faster. We are also starting to get demand in other areas like agriculture, education, and youth employment. It’s very scalable across verticals.

Q: Are all solutions customized?

A: Not really. There is a period of configuration rather than customization. On the back end, low- and middle-income countries haven’t had the same resources as rich countries to buy hardware and software, so there is a lot of convergence in terms of what they are already using. On the front end, the questions a minister of health must ask to fight malaria in Rwanda are the same as those asked to fight malaria in South Africa or Cambodia. Our platform ensures they can ask these questions on demand and explore data in flexible ways. 

Q: Which countries within your client base are the current market leaders?

A: There are several candidates, but the star performer of a month ago is probably going to be eclipsed quickly by the star performers of the coronavirus era. These emergencies mobilize countries to get things done at a rapid pace and take a step outside their comfort zone. We are already seeing that happen in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, each of which took unprecedented action.

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• Topics
• Technology
• Healthcare
• Early-stage
• Asia
• Africa
• 500 Startups
• TMT
• covid-19
• coronavirus