KENYAN HEALTH STARTUP ILARA HEALTH COMPLETES $4.2 MILLION PRE-SERIES A FUNDING

Kenyan health tech startup Ilara Health announced the completion of a $4.2 million debt and equity pre-series A fundraising round. With the aid of the new financing, the startup can expand its investment in thousands of primary care clinics by utilizing improved business practices and new technologies. 

With this most recent round of funding, the company has invested $11.7 million in total. This includes several awards, including two grants totaling $1.6 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and fundraising rounds, such as a $3.75 million seed round in 2020.

DOB Equity was in charge of the funding. In addition, AAIC Investment, Angaza Capital, Black Pearl Investments, Perivoli Innovations, and Alphamundi and Kiva Capital made follow-up equity and debt investments. Boehringer Ingelheim and the Philips Foundation are new players in the game. Strategic healthcare investors with extensive expertise working with and investing in businesses in the global healthcare sector make up the new partners. 

Regarding the fundraiser, DOB Equity Managing Director Hayo Afman said investors are optimistic about the brand’s potential. Before extending to additional areas, Ilara Health plans to use the most recent capital infusion to scale its tech-enabled primary care model throughout Kenya, according to a statement. 

For the next year, the investment will enable a focus on achieving significant topline growth, expanding the network of partner clinics, which is already quite large, and incorporating the next growth phase into the model. This includes launching employee health services through B2B health & occupational services, initially in a few locations and eventually across the nation. 

Emilian Popa, Maximilian Mancini, and Sameer Afzal Farooqi founded Ilara Health in 2019 to provide high-quality, reasonably priced healthcare in Kenya’s peri-urban areas. The organization started by addressing the diagnostic gap that the region’s primary healthcare clinics were experiencing due to notable differences in testing quality and availability. 

The original Ilara Health concept included:

• Flexible repayment arrangements.
• The training needed to screen patients.
• Revenue-generating diagnostic equipment that allowed clinics to grow their operations right away. 

Since then, the business has grown to digitize every process step, using data to improve its infrastructure business model. This includes acting as a one-stop shop for diagnostic equipment, supplies, and prescription drugs for clinics and assisting them in managing their patient base electronically. 

With intentions to grow to 50 clinics by the end of the year, the company currently covers eight clinics with these follow-up investments and co-branding. The company claims that this round of funding will also help the clinics under the Ilara Health brand become even more robust and increase revenue, demonstrating the route to profitability as long as the operational base stays primarily stable. 

The company plans to enhance internal operational efficiencies and initiate a debt and equity fundraising round to finance working capital investments that underpin the growth objectives. Utilizing a proprietary Practice Management Software (PMS), the company intends to make a significant technological investment to demonstrate its business model’s longer-term data-driven potential. 

Approximately 7,000 primary care institutions in Kenya are owned by the government, and over 10,000 are privately operated. Due to its rapid expansion, Ilara Health has partnered with more than 3,000 of these clinics to provide better healthcare in 42 Kenyan counties, serving more than 5 million patients annually. 

With the help of its cutting-edge technological infrastructure, Ilara Health hopes to close the $66 billion financing gap and obsolete procedures impeding healthcare delivery throughout the African continent.