Jane Chen

This woman invented a portable infant warmer that has saved over 1M premature babies.

In 2007, Jane Chen was an MBA student at Stanford, enrolled in a class called “Design for Extreme Affordability.”

Her assignment?

Build an infant incubator for less than 1% of the traditional cost.

That’s roughly $200.

15M babies are born prematurely every year.

One million of them die, mostly because they can’t regulate their body temperature and hospitals in low-resource areas can’t afford standard incubators.

But instead of staying in the lab, Jane and her classmates flew to India.

They visited rural hospitals, interviewed doctors and midwives, and sat with mothers who had lost babies.

They realized that most of these babies didn’t need a full-blown incubator.

They just needed a way to stay warm.

So the team created a sleeping-bag-like swaddle with a wax pouch that could be heated by hot water or a short electrical charge.

Once warmed, the wax maintained body temperature for up to six hours.

It was reusable, intuitive to use, easy to clean, and didn’t require constant power.

Jane then co-founded Embrace, a nonprofit, to get this device into the hands of the people who needed it.

But from the beginning, it wasn’t easy.

On one of their first trips to a rural village to test the product, their truck got a flat tire.

Securing funding was difficult.

Working with governments was slow and frustrating.

But Jane had already spent years working on HIV/AIDS programs in China and Tanzania, and she knew how to navigate bureaucracy.

By 2012, Embrace evolved into a hybrid model.

The original nonprofit continued donating warmers and providing newborn health education through NGO partners, while the new for-profit arm, Embrace Innovations, sold the device to governments and private clinics.

She raised her Series A from Vinod Khosla’s Impact Fund and Capricorn Investment Group.

When money ran low in 2014, Jane reached out to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

He invested.

Around the same time, Beyoncé, through her Chime for Change campaign, donated $125,000, enabling Embrace to expand to nine countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2016, Jane launched Little Lotus Baby, a line of swaddles and sleeping bags that used NASA-inspired materials to keep babies at the perfect temperature.

The business followed a buy-one, give-one model: for every product sold in the U.S., Embrace donated a warmer to a vulnerable baby in a developing country.

By that point, the warmers had already helped over 250,000 babies.

Today, that number has surpassed 1M.

She’s been featured in Forbes’ Impact 30 and Dove’s Real Role Models.

And she has appeared at major events like the White House Maker Faire, where she presented her work to President Obama.

Jane is an avid surfer and meditator, and her memoir “Like A Wave We Break” was recently acquired by Penguin Random House.