For more than two decades, the city has consolidated an ecosystem of technological entrepreneurship that grows thanks to the ingenuity of innovators, but also to the synergy between public and private institutions, academia and trade associations, among other entities created for this purpose.
As a legacy of the muleteers of yesteryear, who made their way through a magnificent geography, but hostile, imposing, inhospitable and difficult to master, in the new generations of Medellin, the seed of the entrepreneur who knows how to react quickly to difficulties and create innovative solutions to overcome barriers, now not the mountains and deep valleys, but the financial, technological and social challenges, is preserved in the new generations of Medellin.
Today, Medellín and its metropolitan area are a benchmark for entrepreneurship. In Startup Blink's Global Startup Ecosystem 2021 assessments, the capital of Antioquia was considered the second city in Colombia in terms of startup ecosystems after Bogota, as well as the 13th in Latin America and the Caribbean and 183rd in the world in e-commerce and technology.
And it has become an ideal place to locate fintech, hardware, Internet of Things (IoT), software and data startups, explains David Hernández García, Vice Rector of Extension at the University of Antioquia and spokesperson for the Parque del Emprendimiento (Parque E) strategy developed by the University of Antioquia and the Medellín Mayor's Office to support high-impact entrepreneurship.
Netux: technology for health
"We enable institutions to serve many more patients without taking up rooms and beds if not strictly necessary," Sergio Marin, CEO of Netux.
Sergio Marín and Juan Pablo Velásquez were studying Electronic Engineering at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) and were working on a system to monitor cardiac events remotely, with which they designed a product that was considered a success from a technical point of view and, moreover, very sophisticated for the time.
However, the university did not have the capacity to commercialize this technology, so in 2006 they decided to create Netux, a venture that is becoming more and more consolidated and that allowed Marín to be recognized by the MIT Technology Review, owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as one of the innovators under 35 years of age in Latin America in the year 2020.
The company, which today has 250 clients including clinics, hospitals, government health entities and insurance companies, remotely monitors patients with chronic diseases that do not require hospitalization. They can monitor heart rate, oxygen saturation and blood pressure by means of sensors installed in homes with Internet connectivity that send data in real time to medical teams. Thus, they identify if there is a problem and attend to it in a timely manner.
In the service of the welfare of our community, and the prosperity of humanity.
