chronic disease
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Ghana’s Redbird raises $1.5M seed to expand access to rapid medical testing in sub-Saharan Africa
For patients and healthcare professionals to properly track and manage illnesses, especially chronic ones, healthcare needs to be decentralized. It also needs to be more convenient, with a patient’s health information able to follow them wherever they go.
Redbird, a Ghanaian health tech startup that allows easy access to convenient testing and ensures that doctors and patients can view the details of those test results at any time, announced today that it has raised a $1.5 million seed investment.
Investors who participated in the round include Johnson & Johnson Foundation, Newton Partners (via the Imperial Venture Fund) and Founders Factory Africa. This brings the company’s total amount raised to date to $2.5 million.
The health tech company was launched in 2018 by Patrick Beattie, Andrew Quao and Edward Grandstaff. As a founding scientist at a medical diagnostics startup in Boston, Beattie’s job was to develop new rapid diagnostic tests. During his time in Accra in 2016, he met Quao, a trained pharmacist in Ghana at a hackathon whereupon talking found out that their interests in medical testing overlapped.
Beattie told TechCrunch that while he saw many exciting new tests in development in the U.S., he didn’t see the same in Ghana. Quao, who is familiar with how Ghanaians use pharmacies as their primary healthcare point, felt perturbed that these pharmacies weren’t doing more than transactional purchases.
They both settled that pharmacies in Ghana needed to imbibe the world of medical testing. Although both didn’t have a tech background, they realized technology was necessary to execute this. So, they enlisted the help of Grandstaff to be CTO of Redbird while Beattie and Quao became CEO and COO, respectively.
L-R: Patrick Beattie (CEO), Andrew Quao (COO) and Edward Grandstaff (CTO). Imge Credits: Redbird
Redbird enables pharmacies in Ghana to add to their pharmacy services rapid diagnostic testing for 10 different health conditions. These tests include anaemia, blood sugar, blood pressure, BMI, cholesterol, Hepatitis B, malaria, typhoid, prostate cancer screening and pregnancy.
Also, Redbird provides pharmacies with the necessary equipment, supplies and software to make this possible. The software — Redbird Health Monitoring — is networked across all partner pharmacies and enables patients to build medical testing records after going through five-minute medical tests offered through these pharmacies.
Rather than employing a SaaS model that Beattie says is not well appreciated by its customers, Redbird’s revenue model is based on the supply of disposable test strips.
“Pharmacies who partner with Redbird gain access to the software and all the ways Redbird supports our partners for free as long as they purchase the consumables through us. This aligns our revenue with their success, which is aligned with patient usage,” said the CEO.
This model is being used with more than 360 pharmacies in Ghana, mainly in Accra and Kumasi. It was half this number in 2019, which Redbird has since doubled despite the pandemic. These pharmacies have recorded over 125,000 tests in the past three years from more than 35,000 patients registered on the platform.
Redbird will use the seed investment to grow its operations within Ghana and expand to new markets that remain undisclosed.
In 2018, Redbird participated in the Alchemist Accelerator just a few months before launch. It was the second African startup after fellow Ghanaian health tech startup mPharma to take part in the six-month program. The company also got into Founders Factory Africa last April.
According to Beattie, most of the disease burden Africans might experience in the future will be chronic diseases. For instance, diabetes is projected to grow by 156% over the next 25 years. This is why he sees decentralized, digitized healthcare as the next leapfrog opportunity for sub-Saharan Africa.
“Chronic disease is exploding and with it, patients require much more frequent interaction with the healthcare system. The burden of chronic disease will make a health system that is highly centralized impossible,” he said. “Like previous leapfrog events, this momentum is happening all over the world, not just in Africa. Still, the state of the current infrastructure means that healthcare systems here will be forced to innovate and adapt before health systems elsewhere are forced to, and therein lies the opportunity,” he said.
But while the promise of technology and data is exciting, it’s important to realize that health tech only provides value if it matches patient behaviors and preferences. It doesn’t really matter what amazing improvements you can realize with data if you can’t build the data asset and offer a service that patients actually value.
Beattie knows this all too well and says Redbird respects these preferences. For him, the next course of action will be to play a larger role in the world’s developing ecosystem where healthcare systems build decentralised networks and move closer to the average patient.
This decentralised approach is what attracted U.S. and South African early-stage VC firm Newtown Partners to cut a check. Speaking on behalf of the firm, Llew Claasen, the managing partner, had this to say.
“We’re excited about Redbird’s decentralised business model that enables rapid diagnostic testing at the point of primary care in local community pharmacies. Redbird’s digital health record platform has the potential to drive significant value to the broader healthcare value chain and is a vital step toward improving healthcare outcomes in Africa. We look forward to supporting the team as they prove out their business model and scale across the African continent.”
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What top VCs look for in women’s fertility startups
A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in women’s sexual health for decades.
In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is now a 40-year-old invention and even the top pharmaceutical companies have spent a pittance on research and development. Subjects like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and menopause have taken a backseat to other, more fatal concerns. Fertility is itself oftentimes a mysterious black box as well, though a full 10% of the female population in the United States has difficulty getting or staying pregnant.
That’s all starting to change as startups are now bringing in millions in venture capital to gather and treat women’s health. While it’s early days (no unicorns just yet) interest in the subject has been jumping steadily higher each year.
To shine a better light on the importance of tech’s role in spurring more innovation for women’s fertility, we asked five VCs passionate about the space for their investment strategies, including Sarah Cone (Social Impact Capital), Vanessa Larco (NEA), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund), Jess Lee (Sequoia) and Nancy Brown (Oak HC/FT).
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
We’re interested in companies that create large data sets in women’s health and fertility, enabling personalized medicine, clinical trial virtualization, better patient outcomes, and the application of modern AI/ML techniques to generate hypotheses that discover new targets and molecules.
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Jio Health combines online and offline healthcare in Southeast Asia, starting in Vietnam
The internet is often lauded for the potential to increase the impact of a range of primary services in emerging markets, including education, commerce, banking and healthcare. While many of those platforms are now being built, a few are finding that a hybrid approach combining online and offline is advantageous.
That’s exactly what Jio Health, a “full stack” (forgive the phrase) healthcare startup is bringing to consumers in Southeast Asia, starting in Vietnam.
The company started as a U.S.-based venture that worked with healthcare providers around the “Obamacare” initiative, before sensing the opportunity overseas and relocating to Vietnam, the Southeast Asian market of 95 million people and a fast-growing young population.
Today, it operates an online healthcare app and a physical facility in Saigon; it also has licenses for prescriptions and over the counter drug sales. The serviced launched nearly a year ago; already the company has some 130 staff, including 70 caregivers — including doctors — and a tech team of 30.
The idea is to offer services digitally, but also provide a physical location for when it is needed. Therein, the company ensures that “every element of that journey” is controlled and of the required standard; that’s in contrast to services that partner with hospitals or other care centers.
The scope of Jio Health’s services range from pediatrics to primary care, chronic disease management and ancillary services, which will soon cover areas like eye care, dermatology and cancer.
“Our initial research [before moving] found that healthcare in Vietnam was unlike the U.S.,” Raghu Rai, founder and CEO of Jio Health, told TechCrunch in an interview. “Spending is primarily driven by the consumer (out of pocket) and there’s no real digital infrastructure to speak of.”
Rai — a U.S. citizen — said doctors typically “have minutes per patient” and get through “hundreds” of consultations in every morning shift. That gave him an idea to make things more efficient.
“We can probably address north of 80 percent of consumers’ health needs,” he said of Jio Health,” but we also have referral partnerships with certain hospitals.”
Raghu Rai is CEO and founder of Jio Health
The process begins when a consumer downloads the Jio Health app and inputs primary information. A representative is then dispatched to visit the consumer in person, potentially within “hours” of the submission of information, according to Rai.
He believes that Jio Health can save its users money and time by using remote consultancy for many diagnoses. The company also works with health insurance companies for areas like annual checkups, and Rai said that McDonald’s and 7-Eleven are among the corporations that offer Jio Health among the providers for their staff; they’re not exclusive.
This week, Jio Health announced that it has closed a $5 million Series A funding from Southeast Asia’s Monk’s Hill Ventures . Rai said the company plans to use the capital for expansion. In particular, he said, the company is adding new care categories this month — including eye care and dermatology — and it is working toward expanding its brand through marketing.
Further down the line, Rai said the company hopes to expand to Hanoi before the end of this year. While there is interest in moving into other markets within Southeast Asia, that isn’t about to happen soon.
“We have begun to investigate other markets, but at this point feel the market in Vietnam is substantial in itself,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s very plausible that we’d be looking at international expansion plans in 2020… we’re going to be focused on Southeast Asia.”
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