NIGERIA – RxAll, a health startup company based in the USA and in Nigeria, has announced a financing round of US$3.15 million to scale operations across existing markets and improve its drug checking and counterfeiting technology.
This funding round combines a recently closed US$2 million seed round (which was oversubscribed by US$2.25 million) and a US$900,000 pre-seed round raised at the end of last year.
The startup, founded in 2016 by Adebayo Alonge, Amy Kao and Wei Lui, has deployed deep technology to provide quality medication to patients in a move to address the problem of counterfeit medication.
Research says that counterfeit medication is the cause of 1 million deaths per year. One-tenth of this number comes from Africa. Counterfeiting is hard to detect, investigate, quantify or stop.
It is a global problem, with annual earnings from substandard drugs standing at over US$100 billion.
“I survived a 21-day coma in Nigeria 15 years ago. My co-founder, Amy, was hospitalized in Thailand after taking counterfeit medicine. And Wei lost a family member due to contaminated drugs,” CEO RxALL, Adebayo Alonge says.
Some technologies have helped deal with this menace; for instance, radio frequency identification, which works by assigning serial numbers to containers of each product.
The RxScanner, RxAll’s proprietary technology, is a portable authenticator allowing patients to verify their medications.
The RxScanner, according to the company, can determine the quality of prescription pharmaceuticals in 20 seconds and present the results in real time via mobile apps.
RxAll selects high-quality sellers for its marketplace and delivers the RxScanner to them. The machine learning model reads the sample spectra and sends test results that show the identity and quality of the sample in comparison to the reference.
Sellers can be located using the filter, and once batch testing is completed, the seller can release the product into the marketplace and make it available for on-demand ordering, pick-up, and deliveries.
Commissions from deals on the marketplace are how the company makes money. With the RxScanner, it also uses a subscription model for both individual and business users.
In Nigeria, the firm is presently serving ten cities and is actively validating the validity of pharmaceuticals for 1 million patients while also supporting over 2,000 hospitals and pharmacies.
The company has plans to add an extra 14 locations before this year runs out, with a pan-African play set in motion for next year.
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