Thai startups. Three prizes. Your vote decides.

Problem: Healthcare is advancing quickly, but the systems that assess and pay for care can struggle to keep up. Insurers need to understand new treatments to judge claims fairly, while scattered documents and manual reviews make fraud, waste and abuse hard to detect. These avoidable costs put pressure on healthcare budgets and make insurance less affordable, especially for lower-income people.

Solution: Crescent Health works on the payment side of healthcare with two connected services. As a third-party administrator, it manages health claims for insurers and self-insured employers, covering eligibility checks, professional claims assessment, cashless and reimbursement services, provider communication and reporting. Its FWA AI engine turns claim documents into structured data and flags possible duplicate claims, billing irregularities and unnecessary treatment. The AI provides the evidence; qualified assessors make the final decisions.

Its business model combines SaaS subscriptions, usage-based pricing and TPA service fees. The company is in its scaling and growth stage.

At GDHF 2026, Crescent Health wants to connect with medical technology innovators, providers and insurers to bring healthcare delivery and financing closer together, and to show how cutting fraud, waste and abuse can protect healthcare resources and support more affordable insurance.

Problem: Each year, Health Region 9 in Northeast Thailand (Nakhon Ratchasima, Chaiyaphum, Buriram and Surin) sees 600–1,000 rare and undiagnosed disease cases. Patients often face a long “diagnostic odyssey” because of a shortage of specialists and genetic testing, long journeys to hospital and disconnected referral systems.

Solution: The Maharat Medical Innovation Center, the region’s hub for medical research and technology transfer at Maharat Nakhon Ratchasima Hospital, turns local health service problems into “need-based innovation”. It has built two platforms. RARE for 9 links primary, secondary and tertiary hospitals through multi-party video consultations, lets patients give blood for genetic testing at their local hospital, and records consultations directly in the medical record. NMD We Care supports patients with neuromuscular diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, with AI that alerts the care team to red-flag symptoms, Thai voice-to-text for patients who can no longer use their hands, and a secure store for genetic and lab results.

In pilots, RARE for 9 (183 patients) cut the wait for diagnostics from six months to two weeks, and NMD We Care (31 families) brought the no-show rate from 30% to 0%. The center plans to sustain the work as a social enterprise through hospital subscriptions, consent-based clinical trial matching and a freemium app for patients. It is in its scaling and growth stage.

At GDHF 2026, the center wants to share its model with a global audience, find deep-tech partners to strengthen its AI and genomic tools, and attract grants and impact investment to scale up.

Problem: Talking with patients is one of the hardest clinical skills to learn, and one of the least practised. Students mostly learn history-taking and breaking bad news on real patients or on costly standardized patients, and teachers have little time to give each student detailed feedback. Thailand’s health worker shortage makes this harder.

Solution: Embla is a web-based simulation platform where learners interview, examine and treat AI patients in Thai and English. Each AI patient has hidden facts and reacts to how the learner communicates. Answers are scored against a 7-part rubric, with a reason for every mark, and schools can see each learner’s strengths and weaknesses on a dashboard. Cases are written with trainers from each profession. Embla Box, a prototype, runs the same system on-site so data stays inside the hospital or school.

Embla has been used by 345 learners from 18 of Thailand’s 29 medical schools, across medicine, nursing, dentistry and Thai traditional medicine, and won 1st place at NECTEC AI for Thai 2026. Learners can try it for free; schools and hospitals pay through annual per-seat subscriptions and on-site deployments. MEGA WIZ also runs Nótt, a home sleep-testing service. Embla is at the early traction and testing stage.

At GDHF 2026, the team wants to find partner schools and hospitals for paid pilots, recruit clinical educators to co-write cases, and let visitors try a live case and get scored on the spot.

Problem: Thailand is one of the fastest-aging societies in the world, and dementia is rising with it. Most older people have no simple daily way to keep their brains active, and existing tools can feel clinical, foreign or hard to use. Families are also smaller and often live far apart, so relatives may not notice problems until they become serious.

Solution: SabaiBrain runs inside LINE, so there is nothing new to install. Seniors play short daily brain activities built around familiar Thai content such as food and everyday life, designed to feel fun rather than medical. The team is developing a Family Care Circle and early-warning insights so relatives can stay informed. Content is reviewed by the company’s medical director, a retired physician. The service is free for seniors and funded through government and local health agencies, hospitals and corporate CSR sponsors.

Founded in Bangkok in October 2025, SabaiBrain has 600+ beta users on LINE, has been supported by depa and NIA grants, and reached the ITEC ASEAN 2026 semifinal. It is at the prototype stage.

At GDHF 2026, SabaiBrain wants to demo its platform in person, start conversations with public health agencies and hospitals about community pilots, and learn from global teams working on aging and dementia.

Problem: Millions of stroke survivors live with dysarthria, a neurological speech disorder that makes it hard to speak clearly and affects their independence, confidence and quality of life. Speech rehabilitation is hard to get: there are too few speech-language pathologists, therapy is expensive and needs frequent long-term sessions, and patients in underserved communities in Thailand often go without. Between clinic visits, most patients have no easy way to practise on their own or track their progress.

Solution: VoiceUp combines two tools in one platform. AI-powered speech assessment analyses speech patterns and helps speech-language pathologists identify impairments. AI-powered personalised rehabilitation gives patients interactive exercises with real-time feedback and progress tracking, so they can practise at home while clinicians monitor their results remotely. This reduces therapists’ assessment workload and keeps rehabilitation going between visits.

VoiceUp sells annual software licences to hospitals, rehabilitation centres and healthcare institutions, with plans to expand to direct-to-consumer services, more speech conditions and markets across Southeast Asia. Its vision is “Belong to Every Voice”. The company is at the early traction and testing stage.

At GDHF 2026, VoiceUp wants to show its technology on an international stage, learn from global digital health leaders, and connect with clinical partners, healthcare institutions and investors who can help it validate, improve and scale its solution.

Problem: Chronic disease is managed in the kitchen as much as the clinic, and for many conditions daily diet largely decides how fast patients get worse. Older patients often juggle conflicting rules: kidney disease limits potassium and protein, diabetes limits carbohydrates, and ageing bodies need protein to avoid muscle loss. Yet dietitians are scarce, with roughly one for every 35,000 people in Thailand, so most patients are left guessing with a printed list of foods to eat and avoid.

Solution: Founded by a clinical dietitian, Wello Food is built on a clinical database of more than 13,000 ingredients and 1,000 therapeutic recipes, validated against national standards. Its dietitian AI turns the doctor’s prescription and the patient’s conditions into nutrient targets and a meal plan, which a human dietitian approves within minutes. Wello Food then delivers meals built to that plan, tracks what patients actually eat through photo and voice logs on apps they already use such as LINE, and brings in the dietitian when needed. Families and doctors get a monthly report.

More than 800 patients have used its products, and it delivers almost 10,000 meals a month to over 120 families in Thailand. It starts with kidney disease, then plans to expand to diabetes and hypertension, reaching patients through nursing homes, hospitals, insurers and employers. The company is at the early traction and testing stage.

At GDHF 2026, Wello Food wants to show how AI-assisted nutrition can prevent and manage non-communicable diseases at scale, meet government, NGO and funder partners for pilots, and learn from global implementers about evaluation and responsible AI.