How a Young Woman’s Love for her Ailing Grandmother Led to Creating an App That Could Transform Diabetic Care for Millions of Filipinos

Buddybetes aims to make diabetes management more accessible to the estimated 4.7 million Filipinos suffering from the disease.

It all started during the pandemic. While quarantined at home with her family, Princess Ventures, now a 24-year old Computer Science Student at the University of the Philippines, was tasked to look after her diabetic grandmother. It entailed logging all her grandmother’s meals, making her grandmother take medicines round the clock, and checking blood sugar levels six times a day.

“I had an idea that, what if I can make this more streamlined? And of course empower my grandmother to do it on her own also?” Princess recalls.

She thought of developing an application that would make logging and monitoring a patient’s vitals easier to support and unburden both the patients and their caregivers. This gave birth to buddybetes—the first of its kind diabetes-monitoring platform in the Philippines.

Simple and Affordable

BuddyBetes’ services can be easily accessed through the website buddybetes.com with a monthly paid subscription of Php250 a month. Users can expect the following features:

• Blood Glucose Tracking: To easily log and monitor one’s blood glucose levels with intuitive graphs and trends visualization    
• Nutrition Management: Track meals to see how different kinds of food affect one’s blood glucose levels

• Medical Reminders: Provides medication and insulin reminders

• Smart Alerts: Notifies in case of high or low glucose levels and other important health changes

• Comprehensive Reports: Generates detailed reports to share with one’s doctor for better assessment and treatment decisions

While there may be existing diabetes monitoring apps in the market, Ventures explains that they are usually paired with a Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) device. Buddybetes on the other hand, aims to democratize access to diabetic management by not requiring the purchase of an added device.

BuddyBetes is also AI-powered, which allows it to provide added features:

• Voice Assistance: The app can record meals, answer questions, and retrieve user data through voice instructions. “It helps with users, especially older generations who have difficulty typing or have blurred vision due to diabetes,” elaborates Ventures.
• Food Scanning: By taking a picture of one’s food, the app can automatically identify the specific dish and log it.

A Mobile App Version

Ventures began developing the app in 2023 with her teammates through a 10-month incubation program sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology. Eventually, her teammates decided to move on, leaving Ventures to pursue the promotion and further development of buddybetes on her own.

As of this writing, buddybetes has 150 subscribers and an average of 10 to 20 daily active users. Despite the modest numbers, Ventures finds them encouraging, considering that there has been no advertising involved. To directly reach diabetic patients in the country, however, buddybetes has partnered with Philippine Diabetes Support Philippines, a Facebook group with over 40,000 members.

“That’s our goal right now—creating a loyalty base of people that would advocate for us, for buddybetes, and really serve the customers,” she explains.

Ventures wants to make the app more accessible by creating a mobile phone app version, which is targeted for completion by the end of the 2025.

To date, buddybetes has already generated around Php1.5 million in grants and prizes from various programs and competitions, an amount that will initially cover the cost of developing the app for mobile phone use. But Ventures hopes to get angel investors to help scale the business and help “revolutionize diabetes care in the country.”

 “One of the reasons why there’s a lot of diabetes complications in the Philippines—actually it’s one of the leading lifestyle diseases in the country—is because it goes unmanaged. People are scared of managing it. Because when you have diabetes, it’s like a life sentence,” says Ventures. “And I can see in the next five years we will impact a lot of Filipinos and make them see that their daily management of diabetes doesn’t have to be scary. Doesn’t have to be overwhelming.”  

Listen and Learn

Ventures advises other aspiring tech founders to avoid second-guessing their target market. She recommends truly getting to know and understanding them thorough thorough research.

“This is the tendency of people in tech. They have [what they believe is] this cool idea. ‘Oh this is so amazing. I think this will be revolutionary.’ They develop it and when they market it, nobody wants it. Like it’s a waste of time, energy, and an insult to the customers,” she warns.

Buddybetes, for instance, went through 10 revisions before Ventures became confident enough to launch it. She continues to foster improvements, admitting that the program continuously gets updated to better serve its users.

Beyond Profit

Ventures’ grandmother currently resides in Samar. Despite being hundreds of miles away from Ventures, she can easily monitor her condition on her own thanks to buddybetes. To Ventures, this is a testament to the app’s success, which she hopes can be replicated by more Filipinos.

For Ventures, buddybetes is more than a business—it’s a mission to support the country’s estimated 4.7 million diabetic patients and transform their daily struggle to a journey of empowerment and hope.

BuddyBetes won second place at the GrowthCon PH 2025 Startup Pitching Competition – Student Edition.

About GrowthCon PH 2025 Startup Pitching Competition

As part of GrowthCon PH 2025, The Business Manual introduced the Student Edition of its Startup Pitch Competition—a platform designed to spotlight emerging talent from leading academic institutions with established incubator programs.

This initiative seeks to empower student founders by providing the opportunity to present their AI-driven business ideas before a distinguished panel of industry experts and business leaders. The competition encourages innovation and entrepreneurial growth at the academic level and highlights the critical role of Artificial Intelligence in shaping the future of business.

Read more:

This Mobile Application Developed by Teenagers Will Help Detect a Stroke Before it Happens

These Student-Led Startups Are Democratizing Health Monitoring in the Philippines

Promising New Tech Startups Bag Honors at The Business Manual’s GrowthCon PH 2025