Noora Health Alumni

‍How It Works

Nurses provide engaging in-hospital learning sessions to teach family members—Care Companions—how to care for loved ones during and after hospitalization.  Whatsapp-based follow-up ensures that patients continue to get the home-based care they need. 

Why We Funded Noora

In the settings where Noora works, families play a big role in hospital care and an even bigger one once the patient gets home, but nobody teaches them how. We saw this as an elegant solution that was cheap enough and simple enough to scale through government health systems.

Our Journey with Noora

Edith Elliot became a Mulago Fellow in 2014, when Noora was very early in R&D and had only a nascent organization. They achieved impressive results working with the families of private-hospital cardiac surgery patients in Bangalore, but soon realized that the path to scale was via government healthcare systems.

Since then, they’ve spread the Care Companion through governments in several big states in India, a big swathe of Bangladesh, a national program in Indonesia, and most recently an expansion into Nepal where they partner with other NGOs to more rapidly achieve national coverage. In doing so, they’ve shown that governments can be both doer and payer, and have accumulated a growing body of evidence across medical conditions. 

By the end of our decade with them, Noora’s model had trained more than 65M caregivers and patients and that number continues to grow geometrically.

Noora was the first non-profit to be part of Y-Combinator. They won a Skoll award in 2022, and got Audascious funding that same year and again in 2025.  During the decade that we funded them, we were joined by a lot of other funders we respect, including Jasmine Social Investments, Rippleworks, and Cartier Philanthropy.

From Zero to 65 Million Trained

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