2012, Harvard University, Bachelor degree in Economics
Michael Kapps: Education
• 2012, Harvard University, Bachelor degree in Economics
Michael Kapps: Early days
Michael Kapps was born in Moscow (Russia) but is a Canadian citizen. Kapps studied in the United States, graduating from Harvard in 2012. Since he was young, humanitarian aid has been a concern for him, so he founded with friends an NGO in Ghana.
While he was still a student in Economics, he went on a trip because the school very stressed him. So he arrived in Pantanal, Brazil, where he was on horseback, and he learned Portugues with a dictionary in his hand.
He began his professional career working at McKinsey & Company in Palo Alto, California. There he worked for the pharmaceutical industry. However, he maintained the idea that he could do something to transform people’s lives.
Michael Kapps: Career
The season in Mato Grosso helped Kapps to think that he could do something to change the health system in Brazil.
In 2013, Michael Kapps founded TNH Health together with his partners Juliano Froehner and Thomas Prufer, whom he met at Harvard.
The idea of TNH Health arose when Kapps realized that in Brazil health services did not reach the most marginalized areas; however, 90% of the population had a cell phone. With this in mind, Kapps’ solution was to offer health care services through chatbots that send messages via SMS.
The chatbots offered a competitive advantage to TNH Health because it allows the scalability of the system, unlike other health companies that have customer service centers. SMS messages also enable users not to need to download an application, so many of them do not even know that TNH Health exists.
TNH Health works mainly with public and private health systems and helps them to offer a better service to the population. The company focuses on low-income people and has worked on campaigns to monitor Zika and Dengue, in addition to giving advice to new mothers and improving family planning programs.
Michael Kapps: Distinctions
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Michael Kapps: Other facts
The MIT Technology Review recognized Michael Kapps as one of his 35 under 35 innovators in the 2018 edition. Also, he has won the GSG Impact Investing Millennium Award (2017) and was a finalist as Social Entrepreneur of the Future in Folha de São Paulo (Schwab Foundation) (2016).
