Kenyan health-tech startup, Ilara Health secures $4.2m pre-series A

 

Kenyan health-tech start-up, Ilara Health has today announced the close of a $4.2M pre-series A round of equity and debt funding round. According to an announcement shared with Technext, the new fund will help the startup to scale investment in thousands of Primary care clinics through new technology and an enhanced business model.

With this latest funding, the company’s total investment to date has reached $11.7m. This encompasses various funding rounds, such as a $3.75m seed round in 2020, along with multiple grants, including two grants totalling $1.6m from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The funding was led by DOB Equity. It also saw a follow-on equity investment from AAIC Investment, Angaza Capital, Black Pearl Investments and Perivoli Innovations, as well as debt investment from Alphamundi and Kiva Capital.

New to the round are the Philips Foundation and Boehringer Ingelheim. The new partners are strategic healthcare investors who bring their deep experience working with and investing in companies in the global healthcare industry.

Speaking on the fundraise, Hayo Afman, Managing Director at DOB Equity indicated that the investors are confident about the potential of the brand:

“Having supported Ilara Health and its founders since the beginning, we are enthusiastic about the progress and the notable improvement of patient outcomes thus far. We look forward to collaborating with our new partners to support the team in redefining the standard of medical care in Africa”, he explianed.

According to the statement, Ilara Health will use the latest capital injection to scale its tech-enabled primary care model across Kenya before expanding to other regions.

The investment will facilitate a focus, for the next 12 months, to achieve significant topline growth, keep growing the already large partner clinics network, and incorporate the next phase of growth into its model, which includes the launch of the employee health services through B2B health & occupational services, initially in select locations and later throughout the country.

Read also: Kenya’s Ilara Health Raises $3.75m Series A Funding to Bring Affordable Diagnostics to Rural Africa

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. The company began by addressing the gap in diagnostics impacting primary healthcare centres in the region due to significant disparities in availability and quality testing.

Speaking on the round, Emilian Popa, CEO and Co-founder of Ilara Health expressed his joy in his team’s achievement “Ilara Health came about with one common goal; to improve the quality of healthcare for Africans. We passionately believe healthcare should be affordable and accessible to all and I am therefore proud of the measurable impact we have achieved in such a short space of time.”

“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 raise will build on our continued growth and we look forward to driving standardised quality healthcare on the continent”, he added.

Ilara Health’s initial model offered revenue-generating diagnostic assets, which enabled clinics to instantly scale their businesses, whilst also providing flexible repayment plans, and also the training required to test patients.

The company has since expanded to digitising the entire end-to-end operations, leveraging data to enhance its infrastructural business model. This includes helping clinics manage their patient base electronically and becoming their one-stop shop for diagnostic tools, consumables, and pharmaceuticals.

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.

According to the company, this funding round will also strengthen the Ilara Health branded clinics further and achieve revenue growth, proving the path to profitability as the operating base remains broadly consistent.

The company also intends to drive internal efficiencies in operations and embark on a fundraising round of both equity and debt, to support the working capital investments fueling the growth goals.

Ilara Health plans to invest meaningfully in tech

According to the announcement, the company plans to meaningfully invest in technology by using a proprietary Practice Management Software (PMS) to prove the longer-term data-driven potential of its business model.

Live data from the PMS will enable the startup 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.

As it stands, Kenya has over 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.