Ilara Health has completed a $4.2 million pre-series A round of equity and debt to digitize and consolidate Kenya’s fragmented primary care system.
Leading the round is DOB Equity, with additional follow-on equity from Angaza Capital, Perivoli Innovations, AAIC INVESTMENT, and Black Pearl Investments in addition to debt from Kiva Capital and Alphamundi.
This round includes Boehringer Ingelheim and the Philips Foundation.
The new partners are experienced healthcare investors with a strong track record of collaborating with and funding businesses in the international healthcare sector.
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 company started by addressing the diagnostic gap that the region’s primary healthcare clinics were experiencing as a result of notable differences in testing quality and availability.
The initial Ilara Health concept included flexible repayment arrangements, the training needed to screen patients, and revenue-generating diagnostic equipment that allowed clinics to grow their operations right away.
Since then, the business has grown to digitize every step of the process, using data to improve its infrastructure business model.
This involves being the clinics’ one-stop shop for medications, consumables, and diagnostic equipment in addition to assisting them in managing their patient bases electronically.
Ilara Health will be able to focus on achieving significant topline growth, expanding its network of partner clinics, and incorporating the next phase of growth into its model—launching employee health services through B2B health & occupational services—into its model more easily thanks to this investment.
The latter will be implemented initially in a few locations before spreading across the entire nation.
Emiliano Popa, CEO and co-founder of Ilara Health, states that “Ilara Health came about with one common goal; to improve the quality of healthcare for Africans. We passionately believe healthcare should be affordable and accessible to all and I’m therefore proud of the measurable impact we have achieved in such a short space of time.”
Ilara Health plans to leverage the current funding injection to scale its tech-enabled primary care model across Kenya before expanding to other regions.
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