Meet our portfolio: Sophia Parvizi-Wayne, Co-Founder, Kanjo
posted 10th August 2023
Sophia is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kanjo Health, alongside Stefan Bostock. Kanjo is an app that predicts better mental health outcomes for families and we invested in the businesses in 2022.
In this interview, we ask Sophia to tell us more about Kanjo, what it's like to work with the 3SV team and how she defines gender-smart.
This video was originally shared on our LinkedIn page - follow us here.
What is Kanjo?
"Kanjo is the first predictive mental health platform for families, where we refer, eventually diagnose and currently monitor children's health conditions, connecting them to clinicians."
Why did you want to partner with 3SV?
"I originally met Lois and Dalia [3SV co-founders] right at the beginning of our fundraising journey, and it felt like home. I'm going to be honest, I think a lot of the time, particularly in the early stages, investors ask you unrealistic questions about your company. And I felt like Lois and Dalia really wanted to know who I was as a founder and have been so unbelievably helpful.
So even pre-investment, they were like, "Can we introduce you to this person?" "We don't like this about your LinkedIn. We do like this." And I felt like, I don't want to say the word 'maternal' because it's really cliché, but I am a young female founder and I think going to people who don't judge you but ask what's wrong, and you feel willing to tell them, what's is something you very, very, very rarely get with investors."
What do 3SV bring to the table as investors?
"I think a lot of what they bring is community and support.
As a founder, you always want to highlight the good things that go on. And I think I said that previously. Lois and Dalia, all the people that I go to when things go wrong, I WhatsApp them, I text them, I voicenote them, I call them whenever.
I think, for me, it's a journey and it's a marriage, and I made a very good choice in which wedding I had!"
What does gender-smart mean to you?
"I think it's investing against the biases that may already be procenceived. For me that means being a women, a Middle Eastern woman, and a child of an immigrant. Those are things that quintessentially don't get investment. I'm also working in a space that generally doesn't get investment, children's mental health.
And I think what gender-smart investing looks like is investing in someone like me, in a company that looks like ours."
