EGYPT – Yodawy, Egypt’s leading online health and wellbeing platform, has successfully raised US$7.5 million in a Series B funding to help it expand its product offering and enter new markets.
Founded in 2018, Yodawy has introduced a benefits management platform for pharmacies that enables the entire healthcare ecosystem, insurance companies, pharmacies, and pharmaceuticals, to serve a wider customer base, faster.
The platform allows its over 2000 subscribers to have their medicine and products delivered, insurance companies to automate approvals, and pharmacies to boost their sales through e-commerce offerings.
“Yodawy is powering a digital healthcare revolution in Egypt. The digital infrastructure that we have created is breaking down silos and creating a more integrated healthcare system that better serves patients,” said Yodawy founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Karim Khashaba.
Having raised a US$1 million funding round back in 2019, Yodawy has now raised a US$7.5 million Series B round to help it scale further.
Yodawy plans to use the funding to introduce additional offerings for its growing network of benefactors, and expand into new markets.
“Yodawy is the only player with both B2C and B2B insurance and pharma products and holds a leading market position with its end-to-end offerings. The business has been hugely successful in Egypt, and we are looking forward to supporting Yodawy as it enters new markets in the MENA region, and beyond,” said managing director of Global Ventures Amal Enan.
Yodawy was the first company in Egypt to partner up with leading health insurance providers including AXA, MedNet, NextCare and MetLife – global Fortune500 insurance companies-, to enable patients to use their medical insurance cards online and get their prescriptions delivered at home, saving them an otherwise painful process to get their medications.
Egypt’s insurance sector faces a challenging period due to ongoing reforms which promise to strengthen the legislative and regulatory platform that underpins the industry, but likely to result in short-term difficulties for some sections of the market.
The national health insurance scheme, which is to be introduced in six stages and fully implemented by 2032, is expected to cost approximately LE210bn (US$12.9bn) per year and cover at least 100million people, according to Mohamed Maait, the minister of finance.
A number of funds and organizations play an important role in the sector. There are about 100 health care start-ups in Egypt, said Yara Abo El Waffa, a co-founder of Health 2.0 Egypt, a non-profit group that promotes innovation in medicine.
Many of those start-ups are piggybacking on surging demand for health care. Egypt’s population has nearly doubled since 1990, creating an acute need for diagnostic services, medical specialists, and hospital beds.
Right now, Egypt has about 1.2 hospital spaces per 1,000 people, less than half of what planners consider ideal.
The government has signaled that private medical providers will play an important role in the universal health care program, which received a US$400 million injection from the World Bank last year.