Warmest congratulations to the recipients of the 2024 AGE-WELL Emerging Entrepreneur Award. This year’s award winners, Arjun Puri, Co-Founder and CEO of Symbiotic AI, and Justin Wyss, Founder of NovaSense Technology Ltd., were announced on October 24 at the AGE-WELL Annual Conference.
The AGE-WELL Emerging Entrepreneur Award is designed to give new entrepreneurs the financial resources to focus on making their ideas viable and rapidly deployable in service to older adults and caregivers. The award supports the development of emerging entrepreneurs to create and grow an innovative startup with potential social and economic impact in Canada, while addressing one of AGE-WELL’s 8 Challenge Areas. AGE-WELL is immensely grateful to the Yuen Family Foundation for their generosity in supporting the Emerging Entrepreneur Award Program.
Arjun Puri, Co-Founder and CEO of Symbiotic AI, receives the 2024 AGE-WELL Emerging Entrepreneur Award at AGE-WELL 2024, joined by Dr. Samantha Sandassie (left), Director of Education and Training, and Dr. Josephine McMurray (right), Associate Scientific Director, AGE-WELL.
In receiving the award, Puri said he is deeply honoured. The support will advance the cutting-edge work of Puri and his team at Symbiotic AI who create clinical decision-support tools to help improve heart care. Their product, Revaz AI, provides personalized risk management and treatment insights for coronary artery disease patients.
Coronary artery disease is the second leading cause of death among Canadians, with risk increasing with age, said Puri. Once diagnosed, choosing the best treatment is complex and can be very challenging—even for clinicians, he noted.
“With our clinical decision-support system, Revaz AI, we are using artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of different data points to produce personalized risk forecasts so cardiologists and older adults can work together and can make optimal treatment decisions, avoid adverse cardiac events and hopefully live longer and healthier lives,” Puri told the audience.
The award, he said, will advance his team’s efforts to bring their clinical decision-support tool to market and help realize the benefits of precision medicine for an aging population. “I would like to express my sincerest gratitude and appreciation for the support, learning opportunities and unique collaborations that AGE-WELL has fostered for me for the last nine years, and continues to do even today,” said Puri, an alumnus of AGE-WELL’s EPIC (Early Professionals, Inspired Careers) training program.
Like Puri, the other award recipient, Wyss, is deeply committed to improving people’s quality of life through innovative technology. As Founder of NovaSense Technology Ltd., Wyss is working on a device to prevent pressure ulcers, also known as pressure injuries, which affect over three million people in North America each year. His solution, the Smart Sheet, involves a soft, flexible, stretchable pressure sensor array.
Justin Wyss, Founder of NovaSense Technology Ltd. Though unable to attend in person, Wyss shared an inspiring video message.
In a video message, Wyss expressed “a heartfelt thank you to AGE-WELL for this honour and recognition, as well as their support and belief in what we are doing.”
His company’s flagship device, the Smart Sheet, is designed for continuous patient monitoring. Used in combination with data-driven algorithms, it aims to provide a solution for the prevention of pressure ulcers. “The Smart Sheet has the potential to transform care in the aging population, as well as people living with spinal cord injuries,” said Wyss, a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering at the University of British Columbia.
The AGE-WELL Emerging Entrepreneur Award is a one-year $50,000 salary award. Recipients are matched to key mentors who help support the funded entrepreneur in building or growing their business. They are also given access to AGE-WELL member benefits and specialized services from AGE-WELL partners, such as legal guidance, commercialization and knowledge mobilization support, access to prototyping labs, and entrepreneurship training.
“AGE-WELL created the Emerging Entrepreneur Award six years ago to support entrepreneurs and drive new ideas forward that have the potential to transform the lives of older adults and their caregivers,” said Dr. Samantha Sandassie, Director of Education and Training at AGE-WELL, Canada’s technology and aging network. “This year’s recipients are talented, brilliant, driven individuals who have demonstrated not only remarkable innovation but also a deep commitment to addressing real-world challenges in aging. We are excited to support these innovators as they grow their startups and scale up within Canada’s AgeTech sector.”
AGE-WELL has funded 13 entrepreneurs through the program between 2018 and 2024. The support of the Yuen Family Foundation has allowed AGE-WELL to increase the financial and in-kind support offered to recipients, enabling them to build and scale their businesses more effectively and efficiently.
AGE-WELL is committed to investing in innovators of tomorrow and offers a variety of awards open to everyone from college and CEGEP students to postdoctoral fellows, early career researchers and recently graduated entrepreneurs. To learn more, visit: https://agewell-nce.ca/awards-scholarships.
To learn more about Symbiotic AI, visit: https://www.symbioticai.ca/
To learn more about NovaSense Technology Ltd., visit: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novasense-technology/about/