A Lifesaving Purpose for a Whittie Innovator

For Ashifi Gogo ’05, the journey to becoming a global health technology entrepreneur began with tomatoes.

Since his undergraduate days at Whitman College, Gogo has always let his curiosity lead him to opportunities. So as a graduate student in New Hampshire, when he wondered what exactly made the organic tomatoes at the local co-op cost so much, he decided to tackle the problem as an entrepreneur: What if people could scan a barcode on organic produce to learn where it was grown, who grew it and why it was worth the sticker price?

He and a colleague began exploring the concept. Potential customers thought it was a great idea, but they weren’t willing to pay for an app.

“The issue, at least in the U.S., was there’s just too much trust. People go into a shop that says everything is hyperorganic, and they fully believe what they’re told,” Gogo says. “But I liked this idea of a way to check where to get more information, so I needed a market and industry where trust was in short supply.”

Gogo, who grew up in Ghana, knew that pharmaceutical counterfeiting was a problem in many parts of the world. With the help of an uncle who owned a pharmaceutical company, he ran a test in Ghana to see if people were willing to use their mobile phones to verify a cough syrup before purchasing it.

Again, the answer was yes, but they didn’t want to pay for the app.

Still, Gogo was sure he was onto an idea that could truly help people—even save lives. He continued exploring the business concept as part of his thesis at Dartmouth College, where he was part of the first cohort of Ph.D. Innovation Fellows at the Thayer School of Engineering.

Building on feedback from those early tests, in 2009 he founded Sproxil with the initial mission of giving people in Nigeria, then a hot spot of pharmaceutical counterfeiting, tools to ensure they were buying genuine medications—and made it free and easy for consumers by securing government support and financial backing from manufacturers. 

Now, through Sproxil and two new health tech companies, Gogo is working to strengthen health systems in middle-income countries around the world, with the goal of helping a billion patients access the care they need.

An Entrepreneur From the Start

Gogo has always had an entrepreneurial mindset. “Even in high school, I frequently looked for ways to turn an opportunity into a service that people appreciated, with some economic upside for me,” he says.

At Whitman, he majored in Mathematics and Physics, but the liberal arts model allowed him to explore other interests, and he minored in Economics.

He gained practical business experience too. At the end of his first year of college, he noticed a giant box of textbooks that students left behind when they were unable to resell them at the bookstore.

He realized there had to be a better system to connect discarded books with students who needed them. So he began collecting and redistributing them. It was an early lesson in supply, demand and finding value where others saw waste.

After graduation, he stayed in STEM, heading to Dartmouth with a plan to study engineering. But he kept going to business plan competitions as a hobby.

Becoming “one of the early prototypes” in the Ph.D. Innovation Fellows program, which gives engineering students support to translate their research into the commercial sphere, gave Gogo the opportunity and inspiration to pivot.

He founded Sproxil, and he’s been a CEO ever since.

Gogo credits his Economics classes at Whitman with introducing him to concepts that have helped him found and lead a complex, international business.

“While I wouldn’t claim to be anything close to an economist, I approach economics with genuine curiosity rather than intimidation,” he says. “I know enough to know what I don’t know, to approach it respectfully.”

That knowledge has helped him open doors and learn how to ask for help—which was essential in taking Sproxil from a concept to a company.

Opening Doors in Nigeria

Gogo’s experience with his early product verification project showed him that he needed someone to champion his vision.

“The pharmaceutical industry is quite conservative and heavily regulated, so if you’re going to propose a solution that addresses counterfeiting, you need a regulator to buy in,” he says.

He met with the Honorary Professor Dora Akunyili, who was the Director General of the Nigerian National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) from 2001–2009. Akunyili was personally motivated to fight counterfeit drugs: Her sister died in 1988 after being given fake, contaminated insulin.

Akunyili, who died of cancer in 2014, was “an unstoppable force,” Gogo says. “If she wanted something done, it got done. She was quite a visionary in Nigeria.”

Gogo pitched Sproxil to Akunyili while she was attending a conference in Ghana in 2008. She immediately told him to come to Nigeria.

Though Gogo was still a graduate student with no major business experience, she gathered the industry trade group heads for importers, local manufacturers and multi­national companies to hear his plan.

“I give her tons of credit for planting the seed in me and believing that we could pull this off,” Gogo says.

In 2010, NAFDAC launched its Mobile Authentication Service (MAS) using Sproxil’s Mobile Product Authentication technology, which allowed consumers to enter a PIN on certain common medications and receive a text message showing whether the product was real or a suspected counterfeit.

Since its implementation, the technology has been used on over 4.5 billion product units globally, providing a massive, scalable defense to protect patients from substandard and falsified medicines. At the 2nd African GS1 Healthcare Conference in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2019, the Director General of NAFDAC indicated that “MAS seems to have had a profound impact, with the failure rate for antimalarials falling from nearly 20% in 2010–2012 to just 1.3% in March 2019.” (NAFDAC Pharmacovigilance/Post Marketing Surveillance Newsletter, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2019.)

“Knowing that our technology has directly enabled individuals to protect their own health is profoundly rewarding,” Gogo says. “It proves that giving people the right tools to make safe choices can help restore trust in a health system.”

Collaborating to Fight Malaria

Over the years, Sproxil has evolved, expanding its products and operating in countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas.

The platform, which began with Mobile Product Authentication, is now part of a larger ecosystem that also helps brands understand consumer behavior, measure loyalty, track products through the supply chain, and surface critical, data-driven insights to address tropical diseases.

In recent years, Sproxil has partnered with nonprofits on health tech projects as well. In 2025, Sproxil received a $225,000 grant from Investing in Innovation Africa to digitize malaria test results in Nigeria in partnership with the National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP).

Nigeria had about 68 million cases of malaria in 2023 and more than 184,000 estimated deaths, according to the Severe Malaria Observatory.

To reduce the spread of malaria, health leaders need to know where outbreaks are happening. A doctor or pharmacist could give a person with a fever a rapid test, but those results weren’t historically added to larger databases, especially if the test was administered in a private facility. That meant attempts to estimate where malaria was and project its spread weren’t timely, Gogo says.

With the new funding and a signed Memorandum of Understanding with NMEP, he says, Sproxil can now map and project where malaria is and will be the most severe. When patients verify the authenticity of their medicine, they are invited to participate in Sproxil’s Nigeria Malaria Survey. Through AI-enabled data processing, decision-makers receive continuous, timely insights, including current medication prices, preventive treatment uptake by pregnant women, and patient misconceptions, to help guide educational investments. The tool then suggests what interventions should be deployed, such as mosquito nets or mosquito-spraying crews, to stifle outbreaks and save lives.

New Ideas, Big Goals

Today, Gogo’s work continues to evolve with new technology aimed at helping people around the world access better healthcare.

In 2025, he helped introduce AISHA Chat to Nigeria, an AI-powered care triage solution that is building critical healthcare infra­structure for 1 billion people.

“Instead of Dr. Google, you go to AISHA in your favorite chat app,” Gogo says. “It knows your country’s approved medicines and lets you use pictures and voice notes in your local language to describe your symptoms and medical history. Over 52,000 people have sent 360,000 messages to AISHA in just a couple of months since launch, with growth driven primarily through referrals.”

The next phase is AISHA Pro, an AI tool designed to aid clinical decision-making at neighborhood pharmacies and chemists.

In middle-income countries like Nigeria, where no pharmacy chain owns more than 1% of pharma retail locations, getting accurate, consistent and safe advice isn’t guaranteed. “The fragmented, first-line healthcare system in the private sector needs an easy way to implement unifying standards of care,” Gogo says, noting that many Nigerians turn to pharmacies or pharmacists as their first point of healthcare.

AISHA uses custom-trained large-language models and includes “human in the loop” safeguards, Gogo says. The goal is not to replace humans with technology, but to use technology to support, connect and inform people across primary healthcare systems.

The app can even follow up with patients and encourage those whose symptoms haven’t improved to seek additional care, which could help people who may have received substandard medicine.

“The idea is to aggregate enough information to make healthcare systems less reactive and bring anticipatory care as the standard, so that they can help people avoid diseases, rather than just treat them,” Gogo says.

Innovating Around the World

Gogo aims to expand AISHA’s reach across large middle-income countries with highly decentralized private healthcare systems.

The potential impact is enormous: The list of countries includes 1 billion patients. 

Gogo lives in Boston, but says he’s drawn to opportunities to increase healthcare access for people around the globe.

Middle-income countries are more open to technologies that leapfrog infrastructure gaps, he says: “The lack of entrenched infrastructure means that our technological efforts can translate directly into widespread patient access at a dramatically faster pace.”

Working in these regions presents other challenges, of course, especially financial constraints. 

“These are markets where both GDP [gross domestic product] per capita and health insurance adoption are lower, so the patient’s ability to afford certain interventions is more limited,” he says. “It requires both technical and business-model innovation to deliver what is truly needed.”

For Gogo, that innovative thinking comes naturally. Since he was a student, he’s been using his curiosity to find helpful solutions and his creativity to work through challenges and setbacks. His entrepreneurial journey has taught him the value of partnerships. And his successes so far have clarified his focus.

“Everybody needs good healthcare,” he says. And he’s helping connect them to it.