Our story
Benten Technologies is a social impact company founded by two minority, immigrant owners. The work of Benten in digital health and therapeutics is driven by our co-founder’s passion for healthcare, grounded by their journeys. It has driven the pipeline of development from birth to death.
For Tony Ma, co-founder and President of Benten, his origin story and @Simon Sinek’s “Why” starts at his birth during the Vietnam War in rural Vietnam. Due to undiagnosed hypertension, his mom went into an eclamptic seizure and almost died while giving birth to him. Through a miracle, Mr. Ma and his mother both survived the ordeal. As a child, he experienced the traumas of the war and post-war escape by boat, including narrowly avoiding death at sea (1 of 2 boats on the journey was lost with everyone onboard) and spent 7 months at a refugee camp for people seeking asylum after the war. At the center, a large percentage of children his age died from various diseases at the refugee camp. Despite the early setbacks, he came to America, the land of opportunity, where he has had success and is truly grateful. Along the way, life has thrown many challenges and adversity, including financial, familial, and personal losses, including the recent loss of a dear friend to liver cancer. This is why Tony is on his current mission to democratize health and impact a billion lives.
For Katie Chang, Co-founder and Vice President of Benten Technologies, her passion stems from the challenges of being an immigrant, woman, and remote caregiver to her parents in Taiwan. Coming to the United States to study for her Masters’s Degree, she experiences multiple challenges as an immigrant speaker and woman in the tech industry including discrimination and lack of opportunity for growth as a woman in the tech industry, which lead her to start her own company. Over the past decade, with the decline of the health of her parents, she has also been forced to work with her sisters to provide remote care services and support for her aging parents with a slew of health problems including the recent hurdles of early-stage dementia and providing remote support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benten Technologies is a social impact company founded by two minority, immigrant owners. The work of Benten in digital health and therapeutics is driven by our co-founder’s passion for healthcare, grounded by their journeys. It has driven the pipeline of development from birth to death.
For Tony Ma, co-founder and President of Benten, his origin story and @Simon Sinek’s “Why” starts at his birth during the Vietnam War in rural Vietnam. Due to undiagnosed hypertension, his mom went into an eclamptic seizure and almost died while giving birth to him. Through a miracle, Mr. Ma and his mother both survived the ordeal. As a child, he experienced the traumas of the war and post-war escape by boat, including narrowly avoiding death at sea (1 of 2 boats on the journey was lost with everyone onboard) and spent 7 months at a refugee camp for people seeking asylum after the war. At the center, a large percentage of children his age died from various diseases at the refugee camp. Despite the early setbacks, he came to America, the land of opportunity, where he has had success and is truly grateful. Along the way, life has thrown many challenges and adversity, including financial, familial, and personal losses, including the recent loss of a dear friend to liver cancer. This is why Tony is on his current mission to democratize health and impact a billion lives.
For Katie Chang, Co-founder and Vice President of Benten Technologies, her passion stems from the challenges of being an immigrant, woman, and remote caregiver to her parents in Taiwan. Coming to the United States to study for her Masters’s Degree, she experiences multiple challenges as an immigrant speaker and woman in the tech industry including discrimination and lack of opportunity for growth as a woman in the tech industry, which lead her to start her own company. Over the past decade, with the decline of the health of her parents, she has also been forced to work with her sisters to provide remote care services and support for her aging parents with a slew of health problems including the recent hurdles of early-stage dementia and providing remote support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We have a passion for healthcare, Tony and Katie have created a company culture and built a tribe of like-minded individuals with the manifesto to serve as a compass for our leaders and employees and reflects our values to Do. Better. Wow!™ Our core values are to Do Right, Do Agile, and Do Research and Development to deliver Better Innovation, Better Outcomes, and a Better World. We want our customers and partners to look at the products and services that we provide and say, “Wow!” there is a company that is doing work that Overcomes the World’s problems. These values and principles bind us as a community and fuel our passion for our work each day.
As social entrepreneurs, we believe in doing the right thing (i.e., Do Right) and putting good in front of everything. We believe we need to be agile (i.e., Do Agile) and adapt to the situation, and involve the users in the products and services. Finally, we believe that to be innovative, we have to do research and development (i.e., R&D). This could be formative or summative research in areas of health and safety. As part of our products and services, we want to drive better innovations and better outcomes to create a better world as a result of our work. We sometimes quote the late 1990s Apple “Think Different” marketing campaign that embodies our culture, beliefs, and the types of people we love to work with. The campaign says “[It’s] the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” So call us crazy!