Nigerian health-tech startup, Remedial Health, has raised $4.4 million in seed funding to expand its services across different parts of the country.
The company says the funding will be deployed to accelerate its expansion across Nigeria and to provide access to credit for inventory purchases for its growing customer base of neighbourhood pharmacies and hospitals.
The latest round was led by Global Ventures, the VC firm that co-led its pre-seed round, with participation from Tencent, Y Combinator, Cathexis Ventures, LightSpeed Venture Partners Scout Fund, Ventures Platform, Alumni Ventures and True Capital Management, and several angel investors, including Guillaume Luccisano and Christopher Golda.
Founded by Samuel Okwuada (CEO) and Victor Benjamin (COO) in 2020, Remedial Health makes it easy for pharmacies to source pharmaceutical products from major manufacturers and distributors, including GSK, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, as well as Nigeria’s Orange Drugs, Emzor and Fidson Healthcare.
By enabling neighbourhood pharmacies and hospitals to source from certified merchants, the start-up brings new efficiencies to the pharmaceutical value chains and stems the supply of fake and substandard products. Its inventory financing and loan features help its clients to increase their basket sizes and improve their operating efficiencies.
Commenting on the fundraising, Okwuada said since the beginning of the year, the start-up has grown in leaps owing to the uptake of its digital offering, buy-now-pay-later product, and expansion activities.
“We have seen more than 6x growth in the number of customers on our platform since January. The feedback we constantly receive about what they like the most about our platform is around the ease and efficiency of our inventory finance offering, the variety of products they can access on our platform and the effectiveness of our procurement process – wherever our customers are based in Nigeria, they typically receive their orders within 24 hours,” he said.
“The launch of our inventory finance product has also attracted more customers to our platform, as they have been able to take advantage of it to grow their businesses and navigate the challenge of rising prices. More than 60% of our customers use the inventory finance product and we have seen more than 50% growth in their average basket size since we launched the product,” added Okwuada.
Global Ventures Principal, Sacha Haider said: “The market opportunity to serve community pharmacies across Africa is significant. In Nigeria alone, 500,000 community pharmacies drive over 80% of a 70-billion-dollar market in annual pharmaceutical sales.
“The team at Remedial Health is proactively addressing challenges, including price opacity, poor drug quality control and a very fragmented supply chain through a tech-enabled, pharmacy-centred healthcare network that has allowed over 25% in cost reductions at the point of care.”
Remedial Health’s digital offering includes a digital procurement platform that enables pharmacies to manage their operations by facilitating the making and tracking of orders.
It also supports financial reporting and accounting, while providing real-time market intelligence that improves manufacturers’ decision-making on forecasting, production and distribution.
Its patient medication records (PMR) system gives pharmacies access to client data making their ordering clear-cut and operations more efficient, in the push towards the delivery of more targeted and better healthcare services in their regions of operations.
