Lagos-based e-health startup, Helium Health has recently raised US$10 million in Series A funding to aid its expansion plans. The company which employs the use of technology has its footprints in Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia. With this new funding, the company projects to have an expansion into new markets in East Africa, North Africa and Francophone West Africa by 2020 end.
The company announced the completion of a Series A funding round, led by Global Ventures and Asia Africa Investment & Consulting (AAIC). The startup projects using this new fund to speed up health care solutions across sub-Saharan African.
“Helium Health has the opportunity to solve large problems through its software and help accelerate healthcare accessibility,” Noor Sweid, general partner with Global Ventures said.
Other investors who participated in the funding round include Tencent, Ohara Pharmaceutical Co, HOF Capital, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, Chrysalis Capital, Kairos Angels and Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Company.
Although it had an ambitious vision for expansion, the company started out with providing digital solutions for hospitals in 2016. According to Adegoke Olubusi, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Helium Health, the startup is “building the technology infrastructure to connect a fragmented healthcare sector and power the delivery of quality, affordable, comprehensive care across the continent.”
Helium Health provides hospitals with technological solutions that could help improve operations and how records are managed. It also provides patients with access to their personal health records, prescriptions and lab results. Patients can easily connect with the health team through telemedicine, find new healthcare providers and access loans to pay healthcare bills among many other things.
The medical tech startup offers these services through its flagship Electronic Medical Records and Hospital Management Information System (EMR/HMIS) products, which are widely used medical tech solutions in West Africa. It, however, aims to invent and develop new software products for healthcare stakeholders – providers, payers, patients, and public health partners like governments and donor agencies. The aim is to help boost operational efficiency, improve revenue generation, expand health financing, monitor public health and improve health outcomes.
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has laid bare the lapses of the global health sector, revealing how imperative it is for Africa to build its own modern and digitised healthcare system. As the pandemic keeps biting hard across the globe, innovations like this become vital as it enables patients and doctors to communicate with each other without a physical meeting. This could greatly help in curbing the spread of the virus.
“Only data and technology can produce the required responsiveness and agility to tackle health challenges of this magnitude,” Olubusi said in a statement.
