Dutch-African mobile health payments firm CarePay International has raised $45 million growth capital in its Series A financing round to expand beyond Kenya into Tanzania and Nigeria, becoming one of the best funded start-ups in Africa.
The CarePay platform digitally connects health payers such as insurers, beneficiaries and healthcare providers on to one mobile platform, so that they can transact and communicate with each other in real-time. Due to the permanent connection to all stakeholders, making real-time payments becomes possible if required.
In the past 2 years, CarePay’s platform has connected 4 million lives and 1,200 healthcare providers in Kenya and Nigeria.
“The mobile phone allows you to reach everyone at almost no extra cost, this creates unprecedented opportunities for health insurance schemes”, says Onno Schellekens, CEO of CarePay International.
This round was raised from Dutch private equity funds IFHA-II and impact investor ELMA Investments, as well as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs that invested through the PharmAccess Group.
According to Max Coppoolse, IFHA-II’s Managing Partner, “The current health insurance model excludes huge parts of the African population as the administrative costs are too high, there is not enough data and outpatient costs cannot be controlled. CarePay’s mobile technology addresses all these elements and in addition offers cross-sale opportunities and other significant growth prospects for insurers.”
CarePay International launched its mobile health payments platform in late 2016 in Kenya in partnership with Safaricom, the operator of mobile money service M-PESA, which is considered to be one of the most successful mobile money services in the world and through which an estimated 40% of Kenyan GDP runs.
During launch, Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom, said “CarePay can do for healthcare inclusion what M-PESA has done for financial inclusion. It provides speed, accountability and massively simplifies the user payments experience.”
