Six years ago, while researching for a college entrepreneurship competition, Valentina Agudelo identified a troubling gap in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and the developed world, with women in her native Colombia and the rest of the continent dying at higher rates due to late detection.

She understood that breast cancer, when diagnosed early, can be treated quite easily; most Latin American countries, however, have huge rural areas where mammograms and the diagnostic tools are not reachable.

So Agudelo and her two best friends came up with a conceptual portable device that would enable them to detect breast cancer at an early stage.

"The idea stuck with me," Agudelo said in TechCrunch. "I just couldn't let go of the problem we had identified."

After the contest, Agudelo founded Salva Health and began building the company's first product: Julietta, a portable device that uses electrodes placed on each breast to take tissue density measurements and yields results in minutes to a cell phone, tablet, or computer.

Since then, Agudelo graduated from college, interning at PepsiCo, worked for the Colombian health tech startup Dondoctor, and finished her MBA at INSEAD. A lot was on her plate, but Salva always had to remain her first priority.

Salva Health has teamed up with Grupo Sura, the largest Colombian insurance company, to run a series of clinical trials in hopes of developing an AI model that could be used to predict breast cancer risk.

Today, it has 13 employees, but it is awaiting regulatory approvals from Colombia's INVIMA, the national agency akin to the FDA for such medical devices.  JULIETA WILL NOT Replace Mammograms "The idea is not that [Julieta] should substitute mammograms. That was never the aim. We want to know when they have an anomaly in which the probability of cancer could exist," Agudelo added.

Salva, a finalist for the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Startup Battlefield, will start spreading Julieta throughout Latin America once it gets the green light from INVIMA. Agudelo explained that commercial treaties are in place between other countries in the region and INVIMA and its approvals.

The company will also request the FDA to consider INVIMA's approval. As Agudelo pointed out, even though the United States does not have an acute shortage of mammography machines or a large number of rural people, conducting some mammograms on certain women with Julieta can save health insurances a huge amount of money.
"And then, we want to start getting approval and recognized in other countries, focused on emerging markets: Africa, India," she said.

Rather than trying to sell the device into clinics, Salva is just going to give it away for free, but he'll bill health payors each time it is used.

"That's the advantage of taking the hardware-as-a-service business model. So control of the device and also the data go through her company so it can tweak it if they see opportunities for improvement, right?", Agudelo explained.

But Salva would not stop there. Agudelo said, "We are now looking for solutions to early signs of diabetes and cardiovascular disease." "We are focusing on detecting these conditions early so they can get proper diagnosis and treatment at a fraction of the cost," she added.