Remedial Health a Nigerian healthtech startup has raised $4.4 million seed round which aimed at accelerating its expansion across Nigeria and to provide access to credit for inventory purchases for its growing customer base of neighborhood pharmacies and hospitals.
The 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 a number of angel investors, including Guillaume Luccisano.
Samuel Okwuada the CEO of Remedial Health , 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.
Remedial Health was founded by Samuel Okwuada (CEO) and Victor Benjamin (COO) in 2020.The company enables 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.
The founders, having had a combined 20+ years of experience in the pharmaceutical and software development sectors in Africa, decided to fix the broken medicine supply chain.
By enabling neighbourhood pharmacies and hospitals to source from certified merchants, the start-up brings in new efficiencies to the pharmaceutical value chains and stems the supply of fake and substandard products. Its inventory financing and loans features help its clients to increase their basket sizes, and improve their operating efficiencies.
Global Ventures Principal, Sacha Haider said: “The market opportunity to serve community pharmacies across Africa is significant. In Nigeria alone, 500,000 comunity pharmacies drive over 80% of a 70-billion-dollar market in annual pharmaceutical sales. The team at Rememdial Health is proactively addressing challenges, including price opacity, poor drug quality control and a very fragmented supply chain though a tech-enabled, pharmacy-centered healthcare network that has allowed over 25% in cost reductions at the point of care.”