Moner Bondhu secures UNICEF Venture Fund investment

Moner Bondhu has been selected to receive an investment from the UNICEF Venture Fund.

The announcement was made on November 28 on UNICEF's official website. This investment aims to bolster an open-source platform with AI-driven solutions, enhancing access to mental health services for children, students and underserved communities.

This achievement underscores Moner Bondhu's alignment with the Fund's mission to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create diagnostic models, predictive analytics, and data-driven health insights to improve healthcare delivery and resource allocation in marginalised regions. This will allow a faster care delivery model integrated with multiple stakeholders and a proactive approach to children's mental, physical, nutritional and academic care. The solution will be open-sourced, community-driven, and scalable to any region, culture, and country.

Commenting on the milestone, Tawhida Shiropa, CEO of Moner Bondhu, said, "Our in-house tech team has developed an AI-powered system called Manush-E, designed to help individuals assess their mental well-being with real-time data and get interventions from experts. For our scale-up, the investment will help conduct more tech-based research and make mental health support accessible to even more people, especially children. It has been proved that Moner Bondhu can make and innovate global standard tech products."

During the investment period, Moner Bondhu will focus on enhancing its well-being services, including training new machine learning models, refining intervention techniques, and improving the user experience for its AI-powered mental health expert, Manush-E.

The UNICEF Venture Fund received over 500 submissions from 71 countries. The selection and evaluation process started in December 2023, and it's been a year. After a series of pitching, prototype tests, clinical trials, and due diligence throughout this rigorous process, Moner Bondhu has been selected.. Moner Bondhu is one of only four chosen startups representing Bangladesh, India, Kenya, and Colombia. 

This partnership is part of the UNICEF Venture Fund's broader initiative to support startups developing cutting-edge technology solutions to address health challenges in marginalized communities, especially children in remote or fragile contexts.