Nigeria's Helium Health secures $10m in series A financing round
Helium Health, a Lagos-based healthcare technology company, today announced it has completed a $10 million series-A funding round. Global Ventures and Asia Africa Investment & Consulting (AAIC) co-led the investment round with participation from Tencent, Ohara Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, HOF Capital, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, Chrysalis Capital, Kairos Angels and Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Company.
With the new investment round, Helium Health will expand its market footprint. In addition to growing its current customer base in Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia, the company will use the funding to support expansion into new markets in North Africa, East Africa, and Francophone West Africa this year.
Helium Health is growing its tech product suite beyond its flagship offering, an electronic medical records/hospital management information system (EMR/HMIS), which is the most widely used in West Africa. Building on its EMR/HMIS product, Helium Health is rolling out newly developed software products for healthcare stakeholders – providers, payers, patients, and public health partners such as governments and donor agencies. These new products will help boost operational efficiency, improve revenue generation, expand health financing, monitor public health and improve health outcomes.
– Helium Teleclinic: a platform that enables brick and mortar hospitals to have televisits with their patients and remain competitive in the digital age. With the Helium Teleclinic solution, healthcare providers can see more patients in less time, expand their clientele and earn more revenue.
– HeliumPay: a billing and payments solution that enables healthcare facilities to accept payments from multiple sources (debit cards, bank transfers and USSD payments) linking them to patient invoices. In addition to facilitating reconciliation, accounting and auditing, HeliumPay helps facilities improve billing enforcement, plug financial leakages and gain visibility into their revenues.
– Helium CareCredit: a provider-financing product that enables Helium Health to analyse a health facility’s operational, clinical and financial performance data captured by its EMR to create a unique healthcare lending credit score and offer healthcare facilities collateral-free loans.
– Helium Cover: enrollee, tariff and claims management product that reduces fraud and simplifies the health insurance claims process for corporate, government and health maintenance organisations and the health providers in their networks.
– MyHelium Patient Superapp: an app (Android, iOS and web) that helps healthcare facilities manage patient engagement and retention by enabling patients to view their medical records (visit summaries, lab results, prescriptions), book appointments and order medication.
“We started out with taking hospitals digital but our vision has always been bigger. We are building the technology infrastructure to connect a fragmented healthcare sector and power the delivery of quality, affordable, comprehensive care across the continent. The devastating impact of the pandemic is a humbling reminder of how critical responsive and agile health systems are to our collective well-being. Only data and technology can produce the required responsiveness and agility to tackle health challenges of this magnitude. It has never been more imperative for Africa to build a modern and digitised healthcare system,” said Adegoke Olubusi, co-founder and CEO, Helium Health.
“We are greatly honoured to be part of this journey with Helium Health. From our first meeting with the management team, we saw that the company had an outstanding track record and huge potential for digitising the healthcare sector in Africa,” said Nobuhiko Ichimiya, co-lead investor, AAIC.
“We are excited to partner with Helium Health as the need for healthcare data and inclusion in emerging markets is exacerbated by the pandemic. Helium Health has the opportunity to solve large problems through its software and help accelerate healthcare accessibility,” said Noor Sweid, general partner with Global Ventures.
Founded in 2013, AAIC is the investment manager of Asia Africa Investment & Consulting, which focuses on long-term capital appreciation by investing in small and medium-sized private healthcare delivery businesses in sub-Saharan Africa. AAIC has company offices in Singapore and Kenya.
Global Ventures is a UAE-based, growth-focused venture capital firm investing in revenue-generating enterprise technology companies and working with globally-minded, growth stage companies in the MEA region to enable emerging market founders to scale their companies into global success stories.
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