Our Mission
“At Nexleaf, our mission is to partner with countries to ensure they have the data they need to build lasting solutions that improve the health of people.”
Who We Are
Nexleaf Analytics is a non-profit technology company that designs and implements IoT solutions for low- and middle-income country health systems. Our small global team works shoulder to shoulder with Ministries of Health to transform analog, paper-based practices into a digital network of connected clinics. We collect data from anywhere—urban hospitals, rural health facilities, a vaccine coldbox on the back of a moped—and train health workers to use real-time information to address equipment failures and save lives. Our technology, data dashboards, and alerts are co-designed with health workers to ensure maximum utility and adoption. By ensuring countries have the information, know-how, support, and resources needed to confidently make decisions, allocate scarce resources, and strengthen operations, Nexleaf builds a culture of data system-wide, saving lives and money.
Meet our team.
Our Values
We pursue the truth
We believe that getting to a more accurate understanding of the world – or a problem, a device, a dynamic, and so on – will always result in better outcomes. Investigating, understanding, and describing the truth are our core competencies and guiding principles.
We iterate
While we are laser-focused on the truth, we actively pursue social impact by acting upon our current understanding. Our operational decisions are guided by up-to-date information on the situation, needs, and on-the-ground realities. We bring our users into this iterative process with us as partners. We believe that this is how progress happens.
We embrace complexity
Once we focus on an impact area, we relentlessly investigate to understand known challenges and uncover hidden problems. With data as our entry point, we help design comprehensive solutions that actually result in the intended impact. We advocate with data to motivate others to embrace our complex point of view.
We work shoulder-to-shoulder
We work alongside others, from our end users to our donors, rejecting both entrenched social hierarchies and market-domination strategies. We do not view others as “beneficiaries” of our work, nor as “competitors” to our business, but rather as key partners – peers – in achieving shared goals.
We challenge the status quo
We strive to learn from our failures, and confidently share even our most dismal findings, because we are fully committed to helping identify effective solutions for any global problem we work to help solve. While it can be uncomfortable to point out fundamental problems embedded in global sectors, we recognize that acknowledging false assumptions and systemic flaws is crucial to achieving the intended impact.
We're focused on impact
We are dedicated to achieving the end goals of our interventions, collaborating with public and private sector partners to drive complex global endeavors toward success. We care about achieving impact, not staking out Nexleaf’s role in it.
Our Story
Our co-founders, Nithya Ramanathan and Martin Lukac, met as graduate students at UCLA and realized they had a shared vision: addressing global challenges using easily available and affordable sensor technology. How could real-time data support people in every country, even the most remote areas of the world, to improve human health?
Inspired by a desire to create change that would serve communities for generations to come, Nithya and Martin started Nexleaf in 2009. Working together in Nithya’s garage, they created a low-cost sensor that connected to the audio jack on a smartphone. This first-of-its-kind technology revolutionized the way data can be generated anywhere in the world to help inform public health systems.
Now, Nexleaf works across 26 countries and partners with governments, health leaders, NGOs, philanthropists, foundations, and multilateral stakeholders to tackle some of the most complex challenges in public health using sensor technologies and data analytics. Working side-by-side with our partners, we continue to innovate and advocate in order to improve the health of everyone, everywhere.
Data Rights
We do not seek to extract or capture data from countries, especially low- and lower-middle-income countries that already contend with a history of resource depletion and extraction by foreign interests. We believe that countries always own their data, and the scale of data systems should always be informed by countries’ data rights.
We believe ample available data helps build consensus and align incentives. For this reason, we want data to flow and proliferate within the countries we work with, and throughout the sectors we support. Any barriers to the flow of data within the country could hinder the end goal: improving outcomes for life-saving interventions (such as immunization) that require specialized equipment (such as vaccine fridges) to function optimally.
Areas of Focus
Vaccine Program
Providing actionable data insights to improve the efficacy and reliability of vaccine distribution in the hardest-to-reach places.
Medical Equipment Program
Safeguarding the availability, quality, and functionality of medical equipment in under-resourced health facilities