At a time when the coronavirus has turned investors’ attention to healthcare, Lagos-based startup Healthlane, which assists its users to gain access to quality and affordable healthcare services has secured an investment from the London-based venture capital firm Digital Horizon. The total fund from all investors was $2.4M.

Here Is What You Need To Know

• Apart from Digital Horizon, other participating investors include Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, TSVC, Supernode Ventures, CRE Africa, Capitoria, as well as several early investors including leading Chinese healthtech company Ping An Good Doctor. 
• Armed with the new funding, the startup plans to repeat the success of “Ping An Good Doctor” by building an ecosystem of medical services based on existing offline infrastructure.
• The startup also aims to add such other features such as calling a doctor at home, gaining access to test results and prescriptions, telemedicine, and ordering medicines with delivery to the startup’s solutions. 
• Healthlane is one if the 12 African startups selected for the 2020 batch of Y Combinator, a famous American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005

Read also: How The Coronavirus Has Revealed The Need For More Venture Capital Funding For African Healthcare Startups.

Why Did The Investors Invest? 

Digital Horizon is an international investment company that combines a venture fund and a venture builder. The Digital Horizon venture fund invests in early-stage start-ups that have working products and promising solutions for the financial industry, e-commerce, education and enterprise software. The venture builder creates breakthrough projects in finance, retail, marketing, and media. 

“Unlike many startups that rely only on telemedicine, Healthlane’s solution combines remote and face-to-face health services. Furthermore, the service’s customers become not only users but also doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and other market participants. In the future, this all-in-one approach will enable the company to expand the list of services by adding, for example, insurance products. In this, the company’s model is similar to the Chinese platform Ping An Good Doctor, whose audience over several years of operation amounted to 315 million people, with its capitalisation on the stock exchange growing to $15 billion. I am confident that Africa needs such projects, so we will continue to monitor the development of the local digital healthcare sector and will keep looking for exciting opportunities,” Alan Vaksman, founder, and managing partner of Digital Horizon said.

A Look At What The Startup Does

Founded in 2020 by a Cameroonian and former co-founder of GiftedMom, Alain Nteff, who was also a one-time winner of the Mastercard Foundation Premier Social Entrepreneur Award, the Anzisha Grand Prize and Queen’s Young Leaders Award, Lagos-headquartered startup Healthlane allows its users to book fast track appointments in top medical facilities at a public clinics through an app.

A statement noted that the startup now maintains partnerships with over 30 medical institutions both in Nigeria and Cameroon. The statement also noted that the startup’s clientbase has also exceeded 60,000 people in the first half of 2020, six months after its launch. 

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer