Dawatek ( from Swahili, a combination of dawa: Medicine, teknolojia: Technology) is a medical device company that was inspired by our aunty’s, Subila Wangui King’ori, life and death. She first taught me how to make my favorite dessert, pineapple crumble. Her late stage colo-rectal cancer was diagnosed late in part due to lack of access to diagnostic technology in Kenya (there were only 3 working MRI’s in Kenya at the time). My brother Isaac thought that he could use raman spectroscopy to develop technologies that would enable the early detection of cancer in a cheap and scalable manner, and thus contribute to the world by removing one more cause for suffering–the late diagnosis of medical conditions.
The Covid-19 pandemic presented a lot challenges and opportunities to our team. First it presented an opportunity for us to apply our core technology, raman spectroscopy, towards an acute and salient public health issue, because raman spectroscopy has been used to detect and diagnose viruses such as the influenza virus (which is itself a type of coronavirus). We therefore pivoted to apply our technology towards Covid-19 diagnostics.
The pandemic also posed challenges, such as the time when three quarters of our team got infected with Covid-19 within several days of each other. At the time, we didn’t know how we would get a hold of Sars-CoV2 for our prototype; our infections had a silver lining because we could now quarantine ourselves and use our infected saliva as the first samples for our device.
So far, Dawatek has raised $ 37,000, had about 60 customer conversations and received two letters of intent. I focus on the product, strategy and finance for the team as C.O.O.