The Early Signals Behind a Growing Health Technology Platform
- Oct 11, 2022
- 4 min read
Written by: Ryan Mercer
In July 2014, BBVA and Google hosted InnovaChallenge MX, a developer competition open to engineers across Latin America and beyond. The field included 378 developers from 36 countries. The evaluators were senior technical staff from both organizations. Ruben Sandoval Davila, working out of Mexico, took first place. The app he built was called CFDI Movil, a tool for mobile tax invoice management that the judges cited for its engineering quality and practical utility. The prize was ten thousand euros and a profile in Forbes Mexico.
Six months later, in January 2015, BBVA ran InnovaApps+, a separate global competition with a tighter field: 114 developers from 13 countries. Sandoval entered again, this time with an app called Socio, and placed second. Two top-tier finishes in back-to-back international developer competitions, evaluated by engineers from two of the largest technology and financial institutions in the world.
The detail that matters here is the nature of the competition. These were not startup pitch events. There were no slide decks, no revenue projections, no five-year plans delivered to a panel of venture capitalists. InnovaChallenge and InnovaApps+ were developer evaluations. The judges reviewed the code, the architecture, the functionality, and the technical execution. Sandoval's results were a measure of engineering ability, not storytelling ability.
That distinction is worth emphasizing because much of what followed built directly on the technical credibility those results established. A startup pitch competition proves you can tell a compelling story. A developer competition proves you can build something that works under evaluation conditions designed to test exactly that.
Sandoval went on to co-found Avena Technologies, the company behind Avena Health, a digital nutrition and clinical wellness platform that has become one of the largest of its kind in Latin America. The platform he built as CTO applies AI and machine learning to clinical nutrition workflows, embedding automation into the care process while keeping human specialists involved at the touchpoints where their judgment produces the best patient outcomes. He is the company's CTO, responsible for the AI and machine learning architecture, the clinical data infrastructure, and the product design decisions that have shaped the platform from its earliest version to its current production system.
In September 2022, Google selected Avena for its Google for Startups Accelerator for Latino Founders. The cohort was announced on Google's official blog on September 8, 2022. The program typically admits ten to fifteen companies from hundreds of applicants, with selection criteria that emphasize demonstrated traction and deep technical expertise in AI and machine learning. Avena had both. Alumni of the program have collectively raised more than twenty-five billion dollars and represent a combined valuation exceeding one hundred billion dollars. Sandoval's company was admitted on the strength of what it had already built, not on the strength of what it promised to build next.
Apple's editorial team independently recognized the platform as well. Avena was named App of the Day, a selective editorial feature that Apple's team curates based on product quality, design, and user experience. The recognition is not purchased or applied for. It is awarded. Avena also appeared on Apple's Hecho en Mexico list, a curated selection of Mexican-developed apps highlighted for their quality and cultural relevance. Google placed the platform on its own Hecho en Mexico featured apps program. Dual recognition from both major mobile platforms is uncommon for any developer. For a health technology company operating out of Mexico, it signals that the product had reached a standard of design and engineering that both Apple and Google considered worth surfacing to their global user bases.
Sandoval was also an early adopter of Google ML Kit in Mexico, integrating the machine learning framework into Avena's product infrastructure before the broader regional market had begun experimenting with it. That early technical positioning gave Avena an advantage in applied AI capabilities that competitors in the region were slower to develop.
The arc from the BBVA competitions to the Google Accelerator to the Apple and Google editorial recognitions traces a consistent pattern. Each milestone was earned through technical evaluation by an external institution with no financial relationship to Sandoval or his company. The BBVA judges reviewed his code. Google's accelerator team reviewed his product and its traction. Apple's editors reviewed the app experience. None of these recognitions was purchased, and none were the result of a single impressive demo. They were the product of sustained engineering quality applied across different contexts over a period of years.
What the recognitions have been validating, in aggregate, is a platform that Sandoval has scaled from a regional nutrition app into a clinical infrastructure system serving thousands of health specialists across Latin America. The next chapter is already in motion. Sandoval and his team are preparing to launch Alva Health, a new AI-native platform designed for the U.S. market and built on the clinical architecture and operational knowledge accumulated over years of production-scale deployment in Latin America. The platform they built in Mexico grew into one of the region's largest digital nutrition systems, serving thousands of health specialists and processing patient consultations at a volume that most American competitors have not yet reached.
The U.S. digital health market is crowded and noisy. Most of the companies in it have been funded generously and validated thinly. Sandoval enters it with something that is harder to manufacture than a fundraising round: a trail of independent, technically rigorous validations from institutions with no financial stake in his success, stretching back nearly a decade. The first of those validations came from a developer competition in Mexico City in the summer of 2014, where senior engineers from Google and BBVA reviewed his code and ranked it first among hundreds of entries. Everything that followed has confirmed what the judges in that room already saw.
Awards and editorial features do not, on their own, predict commercial success. Plenty of well-recognized products have failed to find markets. But the pattern here is notable for its consistency and its source diversity. A developer competition judged by Google and BBVA engineers, a startup accelerator run by Google, editorial recognition from Apple, and a second editorial recognition from Google represent four independent institutions, across nearly a decade, arriving at a similar assessment of the same person's technical work. That trail is difficult to manufacture and more difficult to dismiss.
