It’s not rare for an entrepreneur’s personal experience to inspire what they end up doing years into their careers. In Sophie Smith’s case, that experience was the passing of her grandmother from breast cancer five years after she received treatment, due to a doctor’s negligence. The assumption that an overweight woman in her late 50s needed a diet rather than proper health checks meant the cancer had not only come back, but had metastasized and spread to her liver, making it too late to treat.

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Her grandmother’s experience — along with many other women’s — inspired Nabta, a UAE-based women-centric preventive care platform that aims to both expand healthcare accessibility for women and improve their odds at early diagnoses and prevention with more comprehensive health packages tailored to their needs.

Smith (LinkedIn) is the subject of this morning’s My Morning Routine, which every Friday goes behind the scenes with a successful member of the community to see how they start their day, while throwing in some business questions for fun. This week, we sat down with Smith to talk about the platform, the inequity gaps her company strives to address across the wider MENA region, and the realities of scaling a regional healthtech startup while juggling the complexities of motherhood.

EnterpriseAM: It seems from your background that you’re quite passionate about companies with a mission to drive humanitarian change, particularly in healthcare. How did that start?

SS: We see significant inequity in the region in terms of gender and race. Women were excluded from clinical trials until 1993, which means they are significantly more likely to suffer adverse health outcomes than men just because they’ve been excluded by design. It also takes four times longer on average to diagnose women with the same chronic conditions as men, even though they’re twice as likely to see a doctor in the first place.

E: How does your platform make healthcare more equitable and accessible for women?

SS: The platform offers a hybrid model of care that combines digital and traditional care that’s catered to women — it’s low-cost, prevention-focused, and meets them where they are, with options for remote check-ups, as opposed to expecting them to spend hours in clinics going from specialist to specialist to specialist.

Initially, we thought we would come to market with a direct-to-consumer offering, and we tried that in 2022 with a digital platform, supported by machine learning and a couple of partnerships with clinics. We realized within six weeks that it was not going to work in the UAE because the primary payer of care is not individuals, it’s companies. We pivoted to a B2B model, so the primary purchasers of our women’s health packages today are companies.

In the UAE, most people have access to health ins. because it’s mandated. But what most ins. in the UAE was not designed to do is helping you manage your health and understand it on an ongoing basis. It’s strange because even with our cars, annual health checks are required before you can renew your ins., and that’s 100% a sensible model that we don’t apply to humans.

The majority of the cost is borne by the company, but in case there’s anything that isn’t covered as part of the subscription-based access, we’ve designed all of that to be as affordable and woman-friendly as possible, so everything is payable in up to four installments.

We have a corporate dashboard, and we’re about to add automated self-onboarding for startups, micro-SMEs, and SMEs. Companies will upload their employees’ personal information to the dashboard, but we keep the personal and the medical information completely separate. So, a company can see your name, your email address, etc., but they can’t link that to any clinical data. That’s all totally anonymized.

E: What companies or businesses have you worked with? And are you planning on catering the platform to individual users in the future?

SS: Yes. By the end of the quarter, we plan to have updated our consumer-facing or side of the platform so that it provides the same level of comprehensive service that we do for businesses. We work with quite a lot of banks now in the UAE; we just completed a health check exercise with Standard Chartered Bank for their Dubai employees.

A lot of times, an employee of a bank or company we work with who has accessed our care under their corporate health provision will approach us individually and ask if they can do the same thing for their household, and especially for their nannies.

E: Do you plan on raising any capital soon to open in-person clinics in North African markets — or specifically regions where innovation and care in women’s health is underserved?

SS: We will almost certainly do a Series A to expand from the GCC into other markets in the Middle East and Africa. At the moment, we’re looking at expansion into South Africa and to the Southern African Customs Union. Our goal eventually is to IPO on the Dubai Financial Market so that we can be majority-owned by the people we serve here in the region.

And in the next 5-10 years, we’d like to own or be operating almost a thousand clinics, through partnerships, across the region. We can expand through a franchise-like setup. So, we wouldn’t need to necessarily own or open new clinics but we could partner with existing clinics to make them more woman-centric.

We’ve also engaged recently with the Health Ministry in Jordan to support them in rolling out menopause care to their public, primary healthcare facilities. We put together a proposal for seven specific deliverables around menopause, including changes to their standard operating procedures that could go to their primary health care centers. We’re also looking at a proposal for a third-party sponsored program with them to implement subscription-based access to preventive care.

E: From your experience, what national policy changes do you think need to be made to improve access to women’s health in the MENA region?

SS: I think more grant funding and government-backed grant funding for research and development [is needed]. Another thing we’re working on with one of the government bodies here in the UAE is more extensive and standardized education for healthcare practitioners around women’s health. There are many areas of women’s health that are not included within the standard medical curriculum, not just in the UAE, but globally.

The third thing is an acknowledgment that we don’t provide proper support for women around key life stages, like fertility and family planning, postpartum, pelvic health, and perimenopause. These are often excluded completely from ins. coverage and that means that women will see dozens of specialists and will spend a huge amount of money out of pocket to get the answers they need and will be in poor health while doing so.

E: Any success requires extreme management skills. Walk us through your day and how you’re able balance both your personal life and your work life.

SS: I have four small children — eight, six, four, and two years old. Nabta was founded the day the first of them was due. Luckily, in the UAE, we have really good domestic support. I have a brilliant nanny.

I’m very disciplined out of necessity. I’ve had to align all things childcare-related to make sure that my children are on the same schedule as much as possible. I get up early between 5am and 5:45am. That’s my time for exercise and just gathering my thoughts. About an hour after I wake up every day I have a large protein-rich breakfast which really helps to bring down my cortisol and stabilize [it] throughout the day.

I’m mindful about getting the recommended daily amount of both protein and fiber which, in terms of hormone balancing in women, is really key. I try to have just two coffees a day and I try not to have a coffee after 3pm — otherwise that can make it more difficult for me to get sleep.

I take the dog out for a walk. On the weekends I go to the beach and I walk for miles and try to empty my mind. Then at 7am, I give the kids breakfast, I drop them off at school at 8am and then I work from 8am until 4:30pm when I pick them all up. Then I’m with them and they go to bed at 7:30pm. I usually work another two and a half hours and I’m usually in bed and asleep by 10pm.

E: What’s next for Nabta?

SS: Getting to profitability here in the UAE so we have a little bit more control over how we grow and who we partner with is my top priority for the next three years. And then after we hit profitability, I think the priority is to start to validate at a population level our preventive model of care.

Sophie’s favorites

Her favorite read: I highly recommend Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Mn Years of Human Evolution. It’s about the origin of female health and female organ and health function within the body. It talks about pregnancy as this dance between two beings that are wired to support each other to survive, while not destroying each other in the process.

Her favorite hobby: I dance one evening a week. I used to do ballroom and Latin American dancing for my university. I love salsa dancing, for example. It’s busy enough that it turns my brain off. I cycle, if I get a chance, and I ski. I like being outdoors and I like things that require a lot of movement.

Her favorite piece of advice: The best piece of advice I’ve received came from my mother, who said you get what you tolerate. People can complain that they’re experiencing the same thing over and over again. Take a step back and ask: Is this because I am tolerating something that I shouldn’t? Do I need to create an emotional boundary? Am I unwittingly putting myself in the same situation over and over?

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