Today we’d like to introduce you to Tuduetso Masire.
Hi Tuduetso, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I am from Gaborone, Botswana which is in Southern Africa. I relocated to California in 2021 to do a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Southern California (USC). I have always been interested in healthcare but wasn’t very good at science at school, however my sister and cousin are Dr’s and my brother-in-law is a surgeon which has kept me in the loop in what’s going on in the healthcare industry. I religiously read healthcare books, the shows I watch are about medicine but that’s really what it was my whole life until I got to USC. We took a class called venture initiation, where we had to essentially build a venture and see it through the semester. I had recently had a healthcare mishap when I was home in Botswana and suddenly the idea came to me. There is less than 1 healthcare worker per 1000 people in Southern Africa, and theres long-standing backlog for procedures which is currently placing patients in line for surgeries for the year 2026. So I built MatchAPro, a healthcare software that matches verified traveling surgeons to underserved patients in public hospitals in Southern Africa.
I participated in a venture competition on campus called New Venture Seed Competition initiation and won a bronze and social impact award in the form of cash injection into my startup.
I later got selected for the Blackstone Fellowship which also provided funding to further my startup.
With that push, I have managed to complete the development phase of the platform and aim to go live before the summer.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has been challenging convincing Doctors in the US that not all of Africa is unstable and trying to ensure them that the conditions they will be working under are not dilapidated or unbearable. It has also been tough finding a committed Co-founder so I have stuck to pushing the business with my internal team whilst finding a Co-founder.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about MatchAPro?
MatchAPro is a platform that helps surgeons looking to travel to Southern Africa to perform probono procedures, match with local public hospitals.
This matching software is designed to mitigate the chronic supply/demand imbalance for surgeons in the Southern African region.
The Platforms is currently focussing on The Eastern Cape of South Africa and Botswana but intends to expand throughout the Southern African Development Community countries (SADC).
My specialty is in entrepreneurial innovation and ideation. I have a bachelors in Communications and International Business and a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My previous professional like (sp) – Life. I was an administrator for a partnership between Stanford Graduate School of Business and De Beers Group, which was aimed at building and managing 2 entrepreneurship programs; Stanford Seed and Stanford Go-to-Market, that were meant to build emerging economies and scale their SMME’s.
What sets MatchAPro apart is that currently, all the entities that do medical missions, plan and execute their missions manually. MatchAPro would be the first digital foreign travel medicine matching platform in the Southern Africa region.
I would like readers to join the mission to educate healthcare providers who can make a difference in Southern Africa to take the leap of faith and sign up on MatchAPro.
I am proud that I have gotten this far without having to burn a lot cash and that I have been able to build so much in a foreign country.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Patience has been the most crucial quality in this process as well as being a teachable person.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://matchapro.org/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchapro/
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/BgqlB0GGFbM
