Ilara Health, a healthtech company digitising and consolidating highly fragmented primary care in Kenya, has closed $4.2M to scale its tech-enabled primary care model across Kenya before expanding to other regions.
The pre-series A round of equity and debt was led by DOB Equity, the round also sees follow-on equity investment from AAIC INVESTMENT, Angaza Capital, Black Pearl Investments, Perivoli Innovations, as well as debt investment from Alphamundi and Kiva Capital. New to the round are Philips Foundation and Boehringer Ingelheim. The new partners are strategic healthcare investors that bring their deep experience working with and investing in companies in the global healthcare industry.
With this latest funding, the company’s total investment to date reaches $11.7M, encompassing various funding rounds, such as a $3.75M seed round in 2020, along with multiple grants, including two grants totaling $1.6M from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Founded in 2019 by Emilian Popa, Maximilian Mancini and Sameer Afzal Farooqi, Ilara Health launched to deliver affordable and accessible quality healthcare in the peri-urban areas of Kenya and has since expanded to help clinics electronically manage their patient base and becoming their one-stop shop for diagnostic tools, consumables, and pharmaceuticals.
According to Emilian Popa, CEO and Co-founder of Ilara Health, “There’s still so much more to be done, which is why we are thrilled to be joined by prominent global investors who share our core vision for Kenya and ultimately all of Africa. This fundraise will build on our continued growth and we look forward to driving standardised quality healthcare on the continent.”
The investment will facilitate Ilara Health to achieve significant topline growth, launch of the employee health services through B2B health & occupational services and further strengthen the Ilara Health branded clinics and achieve revenue growth.
There will also be a meaningful investment in technology and the proprietary Practice Management Software (PMS) to prove the longer-term data-driven potential of our business model. Live data from the PMS will enable the start-up to analyse the performance of primary care providers to provide follow-on asset lending and working capital of between $10,000 to $15,000 for: clinic rejuvenations, staff training, provision of diagnostic equipment and a ‘powered by Ilara Health’ co-branding opportunity. The company presently has 8 clinics covered by these follow-on investments and co-branding, with plans to expand to 50 by the end of the year.
Kenya has ~10,000 privately owned primary care facilities and a further ~7,000 that are publicly owned. Ilara Health’s growth momentum has so far seen it partner with over 3,000 of these clinics to deliver better healthcare across 42 Kenyan counties, which in turn serve over 5 million patients each year.
Ilara Health intends to use its innovative tech infrastructure to bridge the estimated $66 billion financing gap and outdated processes affecting healthcare delivery across the African continent as a whole.
