Zenysis Technologies, a big data startup headquartered in San Francisco and Cape Town, announced today that it has closed $13.3 million in a Series B round. The financing was led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, a nonprofit organization that says it’s focused on finding and funding lasting solutions for some of “humanity’s hardest challenges.”

Jonathan Stambolis launched the company in 2016 to improve how developing countries respond to humanitarian emergencies and help them improve public health.

Prior to Zenysis, he worked as a diplomat with the United Nations. His roles involved representing Australia in international negotiations on global health and humanitarian affairs and as an advisor to the UN secretary general on global health and pandemic preparedness.

At the UN, Stambolis’s work gave him insights into the everyday struggles that several countries face in their efforts to achieve ambitious global health targets. In an interview with TechCrunch, Stambolis said the UN’s formula for moving the dial worldwide generally boils down to more money and political will. “What I saw after a while was a missing pillar there, and that was technology innovation,” he said.

At the same time, Stambolis said it was pretty clear that more developed ecosystems such as Silicon Valley didn’t care much about meeting struggling regions’ local health and development targets. Therefore, Stambolis hoped that by launching Zenysis, he’d take some of the talent and resources in Silicon Valley — and South Africa, where the company has its second headquarters — and direct them to work on problems that matter.

Stambolis’s reaction was triggered by the Ebola crisis in 2014. “Watching the world struggle to respond to the crisis at first made it clear that neither affected countries nor their international partners like the U.S. had the software to respond to that outbreak effectively,” said Stambolis. “And I realized that if we didn’t build the software, to help them do that, nobody else was going to do it.”