BusyMed, a South African e-health startup, has secured more money to accelerate its development goals so that more people in more places have easier access to pharmacies.
LionPride, a venture capital firm, initially invested in BusyMed in 2020, and now E4E Africa, a venture capital fund focused on entrepreneurs and headed by seasoned business leaders, mentors, and investors, has joined the company’s backing team.
With this funding, BusyMed will be able to double its pharmacy count to 300 by the end of the year. With this new funding, the company can automate its processes and expand its back-office capacity to provide the highest quality service from beginning to finish.
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“Raising capital in South Africa is not easy but the fact that we have been able to raise it on multiple occasions highlights the opportunity that the e-health market offers locally,” said Mpathi Jezile, BusyMed’s managing director.
Why The Investor Invested
“Access to quality healthcare and medicine is one of the major challenges for emerging markets and we are happy to enable e-health innovator BusyMed to grow and be a key player in this ecosystem,” said Bastiaan Hochstenbach, co-founder and managing partner at E4E Africa. “E4E Africa focuses on backing scalable solutions for real-world problems, and BusyMed can be exactly that.”
A Look At What The Startup Does
BusyMed was established in 2018, and its members have access to hundreds of items sold by local small pharmacies, all of which can be ordered and delivered to their homes, including prescription medicine, in as little as 60 minutes.
Its goal is to provide a digital platform that links customers directly to pharmacies so that they may get advice, shop, and get their prescriptions delivered quickly and easily from the comfort of home. The system provides pharmacists with the ability to track inventories in real time and view sales statistics for top sellers.
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He said that the insights gained from the public’s reaction to COVID-19 were essential for the young company.
“Whether you had access to world-class private healthcare or you were navigating the public healthcare system, access to your medication was critical — we take a lot of pride in the fact that we have played a part in helping transform access to healthcare products and services,” Jezile said.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexpert