Remedial Health, a Nigerian-based health tech company, has raised $1 million (the equivalent of N415 million) in pre-seed funding to promote the digitisation of the pharmaceutical sector and fight the supply of fake drugs in Africa.
The health tech company seeks to build a one-stop digital shop where pharmacies can easily purchase medicines and medical devices from both local and global pharmaceutical firms.
Remedial Health was founded in 2020 by Samuel Okwuada, a UK/Nigeria registered pharmacist and self-taught software developer; and Victor Benjamin, a pharmaceutical field sales agent. They jointly have over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and software development sectors in Africa
According to a statement released by the company, the pre-seed funding, which was facilitated by angel investors, would be a major boost to the company’s plans to expand into new markets across Africa.
Participant investors included Global Ventures, Ventures Platform, Ingressive Capital, Voltron Capital and Angel Syndicate Fund. Other investors were Flutterwave’s Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Victor Asemota, Opeyemi Awoyemi’s (Jobberman co-founder), among others.
Remedial Health which was recently selected for the Winter 2022 cohort of Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator accelerator, plans to build a tech-enabled, pharmacy-centred healthcare network across the continent. Through its innovation, the company hopes to ensure the delivery of better healthcare services across Africa by facilitating distribution from manufacturers to pharmacies and medical vendors
“For those using the system, because we can basically see their shelves, we are solving their supply issues by ensuring that they’re getting the products when they need them. And so they don’t have to go to the market and waste time by going through 20 to 30 individual distributors to buy all the medicines and supplies that they need,” Okwuada said.
According to the founders, the company’s app, Remedial Rx, makes it possible for pharmacies to place orders and receive them within 24 hours.
They added that the app also helps to manage the inventory and daily operations of pharmacies so that the pharmacists can focus on patient care.
So far, more than 300 pharmacies are using the Remedial Health’s app to place orders, and a number of others are using Whatsapp. The company gets its products from over 100 local and international pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers. This includes GSK, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and the Nigerian brands: Orange Drugs, Emzor and Fidson Healthcare.
