Author: azeeadmin

Employers typically offer three options for healthcare insurance. When it’s time to switch to Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage, there are over 3,500 plans available nationwide, and an average of 30 plans someone can choose from in their particular area. Connie Health is leading seniors through the Medicare maze, helping whittle down those 3,000 plans into a handful of best choices based on care requirements.

The company’s three co-founders, Oded Eran, CEO, David Luna, chief revenue officer, and Michael Scopa, chief growth officer, saw this problem firsthand as executives at primary care company Iora Health, which is being acquired by OneMedical for $2.1 billion.

They started their company in 2019 to develop a Medicare concierge service to assist seniors in easily navigating through those 30 plans to find the right one for them.

“We were coming from the provider side and understood that though healthcare is local, people don’t know the difference in hospitals or the ins and outs of local networks,” Eran told TechCrunch. “Seniors need trust there, and when there are local advisers to meet over the phone or at home, you gain that trust.”

The Boston-based company announced Wednesday it raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Pittango Healthtech to give it a total of $16 million in funding. The company raised $3 million in a seed round back in January 2020, also led by Khosla. The seed and Series A rounds also saw participation by AbstractVentures, Dynamic Loop Capital, Arkitekt Ventures, as well as a group of angel investors, including Hippo Insurance CEO Assaf Wand and Flatiron Health founders Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner.

With 55 million Medicare consumers benefiting from major innovation in Medicare Advantage and value-based care, Kaul saw a large market that was being disrupted by Connie Health. He was especially impressed with the team Eran built and how the company was able to launch during the pandemic and stay nimble.

“The Medicare Advantage space is rich and will continue to grow,” Kaul added. “Technology has not played a big role here, and Oded is going to bring technology in to make the market more efficient.”

Medicare Advantage is the private market part of the insurance program. Eran said the government is trying to drive competition and innovation, so there are a lot of new players coming in to create more plan options, more nuances and to help manage costs better. On the consumer level, this creates a lot of confusion, he added. Potential customers have a hard time making decisions on the latest and greatest options, so they tend to stick with the status quo.

That’s where Connie Health comes in. The company’s technology takes into account the providers someone sees, the medications they are on and the benefits they would like to have, feed those into its model, and based on that, sifts through the thousands of plans available and recommends the best fits.

Four months ago, Connie Health kicked off its consumer platform in Arizona, and with the new investment, also began operating in Texas. Over the next year, Eran expects to move into Illinois, where he is seeing big demographic changes as a lot of people are moving into Medicare and other states. The new funding will also enable the company to branch off to other insurance products.

Within those states, the company’s footprint grew to seven markets, and its local agent base grew 15 times.

“We are going to democratize access to the local agents to help people make these often tough decisions and find healthcare that they deserve and have paid for all of their working life,” Eran said. “We are taking this market-by-market approach because healthcare is in the community.”

 

Four high-profile Indian entrepreneurs who are among those who kickstarted India’s SaaS journey, building and helping startups scale and win customers globally and also backed about 100 such firms, are ready for their next phase of participation in the country’s startup ecosystem.

The group — Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Corporation, Shubham Gupta, formerly with investment firm Matrix, and Avinash Raghava, formerly with Nasscom, iSPIRT and SaaSBOOMi — said on Wednesday it has created a venture capital fund, called Together Fund, with an initial corpus of $85 million to back young Indian startups operating in the software-as-a-service space.

Together Fund is looking to back between 20 to 25 startups at Pre-seed to Series B stages. The firm’s check size will range between $250,000 to $3 million, said Garg in an interview with TechCrunch.

Indian news outlet the CapTable first reported about the fund’s formation earlier this year and cited an investor who said that Together is likely to attract all good SaaS deals because of its founding team and problem statement.

The fund has amassed a network of over 150 startup founders and investors including Krish Subramanian of Chargebee, Nishith Rastogi of Locus, Shashank ND of Practo, Kunal Shah of CRED. And that underscores the reason why Together Fund was conceived, said Garg. The entire team consists of founders and other operators who have built startups and have expertise around sales strategy and global expansion, he said.

“This is India’s first operator and founder-led fund,” he said. “The idea of creating this fund was to provide great help and opportunities to the founders along with money.”

The creation of the fund — which counts its founding team among its LPs — comes at a time when Indian startups are raising record capital as many high-profile investors double down in the world’s second largest internet market.

In the past decade, India’s startup ecosystem has evolved from a space that most Indian families were apprehensive about to one that has witnessed several high-profile exits and many entrepreneurs have marched ahead to do their second startups.

“Today, Freshworks is a large company with more than 3,800 team members and offices all over the world. But almost eleven years ago, we were just a six-member team operating out of a small garage in Chennai. I didn’t have a gilt-edged resume or family wealth but that never stopped me from dreaming big,” wrote Mathrubootham in a blog post.

“To me, Together is not just a fund, it is a way to pay it forward to the startup community that gave me so much. It is a natural progression of the “pay it forward” initiatives we started with community programs such as PNGrowth, SaaSx and SaaSBOOMi. With Together, we are not just offering capital to founders, we are offering our time and counsel as well,” he added.

The founding team of Together Fund will continue to participate in other industry initiatives, including SaaSBOOMi, an annual flagship conference focused on SaaS startups in India, said Raghava in an interview.

India’s SaaS industry could reach $1 trillion in value and create about half million new jobs by 2030, according to a recent study by SaaSBoomi, consultancy firm McKinsey and industry trade group Nasscom.

Four high-profile Indian entrepreneurs who are among those who kickstarted India’s SaaS journey, building and helping startups scale and win customers globally and also backed about 100 such firms, are ready for their next phase of participation in the country’s startup ecosystem.

The group — Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Corporation, Shubham Gupta, formerly with investment firm Matrix, and Avinash Raghava, formerly with Nasscom, iSPIRT and SaaSBOOMi — said on Wednesday it has created a venture capital fund, called Together Fund, with an initial corpus of $85 million to back young Indian startups operating in the software-as-a-service space.

Together Fund is looking to back between 20 to 25 startups at Pre-seed to Series B stages. The firm’s check size will range between $250,000 to $3 million, said Garg in an interview with TechCrunch.

Indian news outlet the CapTable first reported about the fund’s formation earlier this year and cited an investor who said that Together is likely to attract all good SaaS deals because of its founding team and problem statement.

The fund has amassed a network of over 150 startup founders and investors including Krish Subramanian of Chargebee, Nishith Rastogi of Locus, Shashank ND of Practo, Kunal Shah of CRED. And that underscores the reason why Together Fund was conceived, said Garg. The entire team consists of founders and other operators who have built startups and have expertise around sales strategy and global expansion, he said.

“This is India’s first operator and founder-led fund,” he said. “The idea of creating this fund was to provide great help and opportunities to the founders along with money.”

The creation of the fund — which counts its founding team among its LPs — comes at a time when Indian startups are raising record capital as many high-profile investors double down in the world’s second largest internet market.

In the past decade, India’s startup ecosystem has evolved from a space that most Indian families were apprehensive about to one that has witnessed several high-profile exits and many entrepreneurs have marched ahead to do their second startups.

“Today, Freshworks is a large company with more than 3,800 team members and offices all over the world. But almost eleven years ago, we were just a six-member team operating out of a small garage in Chennai. I didn’t have a gilt-edged resume or family wealth but that never stopped me from dreaming big,” wrote Mathrubootham in a blog post.

“To me, Together is not just a fund, it is a way to pay it forward to the startup community that gave me so much. It is a natural progression of the “pay it forward” initiatives we started with community programs such as PNGrowth, SaaSx and SaaSBOOMi. With Together, we are not just offering capital to founders, we are offering our time and counsel as well,” he added.

The founding team of Together Fund will continue to participate in other industry initiatives, including SaaSBOOMi, an annual flagship conference focused on SaaS startups in India, said Raghava in an interview.

India’s SaaS industry could reach $1 trillion in value and create about half million new jobs by 2030, according to a recent study by SaaSBoomi, consultancy firm McKinsey and industry trade group Nasscom.

Contentful this morning announced a $175 million Series F round of capital, led by Tiger Global, valuing the unicorn at around $3 billion. Contentful, formerly known as a UI-free content management system (headless CMS), now views itself in a broader light. More simply, Contentful provides customers with a service that will deliver images, words, and other content to their applications and websites around the world, quickly.

According to the company, Tidemark and Base10 Advancement Initiative were added to its cap table in the round, which also saw participation from previous investors. Prior to the round that Contentful announced today, its most recent fundraising event was an $80 million Series E led by Sapphire Ventures in June 2020.

PitchBook data indicates that that round was raised at a roughly $550 million valuation, while our reporting at the time of the company’s Series E includes the tidbit that “a Contentful spokesperson [told TechCrunch] that [the company was] approaching a $1 billion” valuation. Split the difference and it’s clear that Contentful’s new valuation is a multiple of what the company was worth a year ago.

But before we dig into metrics and results — or really a lack thereof — let’s take a minute to chat through Contenful’s business.

What does it do?

TechCrunch caught up with Contentful’s CEO, Steve Sloan (previously of Twilio and Bessemer), and its comms connect, Brian Spittler (previously of Podium), to dig more into its products.

Sloan explained Contentful by analogy, saying that as Twilio served the communications market and Stripe the payments space, Contentful wants to handle the world’s digital content. Yes, we’re talking APIs (application programming interface). Contentful has a handful of core APIs that allow for reading and writing content to its data buckets and making content available at the right time.

In more practical terms, Contentful doesn’t want to help companies build apps. Other companies are rather good at that. Instead, it wants to help customers’ apps load their in-app content very quickly, regardless of where their users are. You can now better understand the modestly aspirational Stripe and Twilio comparison; Contentful wants to take a piece of a developer’s workload, in this case delivering digital content to controlled applications, abstract it and deliver the functionality as an API. So as developers could simply use Twilio to make text messages appear around the world without coming to terms with global telephone providers, Contentful customers can avoid having to think about content delivery networks (CDNs) and global bandwidth for their content.

Now that we have a reasonable grasp of what Contentful does, let’s talk about growth:

 

No, that’s not an errant space. Contentful’s CEO declined to share essentially anything concerning its business growth, aside from that when Contentful raised its Series E it was around an “inflection point” for the company. This irked me a little; we know that the company had a good 2020 and likely a good 2021 thus far. Why? Because Tiger didn’t invest in a $175 million round at a new, higher price for Contentful on the back of mediocre results.

To his credit, Sloan was willing to explain why his company decided to avoid sharing growth information. Per the CEO, when a company discloses pieces of growth data over time, folks will go back when they go public and compare data to claims. And, he added, given that definitions can change, sharing can be more bother than it’s worth. There’s some truth to this: Some startups will claim profitability, for example, only to gently backpedal and explain that what they meant was really adjusted EBITDA, say, or positive operating cash flow.

The solution, of course, is for growth-stage startups to share GAAP-ready data with the media when they want our attention. After all, Contentful is aiming toward an IPO and is probably already learning to get its books in proper order. GAAP results are possible! And to be fair to Contentful, many startups decline to share useful data about their performance when courting media attention, often at the request of their investors; that we journalists of the world have to then deal with other investors complaining to us that the media is too fixated on funding rounds as progress points is a distinct, if closely related, matter.

Why do we think that Contentful is targeting an eventual public debut? Because companies tend not to raise nine figures at 10-figure valuations if they are hoping for a quick exit. The unicorn is now too expensive for anyone but the largest tech companies to buy; ergo it intends to go public. And, yes, we would go back and check claimed results against historical GAAP data in its S-1 if we were able to. That’s research! And fact-checking!

Gripes aside, Sloan shared employee growth expectations in a broad manner. Contentful is around 600 people today, split between its hubs in Denver, Berlin and San Francisco. Over the next two years, it intends to double (or a bit more than double) that headcount. Pull out your pencils and come up with your own revenue guesses based on that. The correct answer is present-day ARR somewhere between $75 and $75 million. Good luck.

Looking ahead, Contentful sells to three main customer buckets, per its CEO: midmarket customers, enterprise customers and venture-backed startups that intend to get big. Given that all of those are either pursuing digital transformation work or are digitally native, we presume that Contentful’s market will remain fertile for some time. That implies a winsome total addressable market for the company to sell into, implying ample future growth opportunities. Let’s see what it can get done with $175 million more.

Contentful this morning announced a $175 million Series F round of capital, led by Tiger Global, valuing the unicorn at around $3 billion. Contentful, formerly known as a UI-free content management system (headless CMS), now views itself in a broader light. More simply, Contentful provides customers with a service that will deliver images, words, and other content to their applications and websites around the world, quickly.

According to the company, Tidemark and Base10 Advancement Initiative were added to its cap table in the round, which also saw participation from previous investors. Prior to the round that Contentful announced today, its most recent fundraising event was an $80 million Series E led by Sapphire Ventures in June 2020.

PitchBook data indicates that that round was raised at a roughly $550 million valuation, while our reporting at the time of the company’s Series E includes the tidbit that “a Contentful spokesperson [told TechCrunch] that [the company was] approaching a $1 billion” valuation. Split the difference and it’s clear that Contentful’s new valuation is a multiple of what the company was worth a year ago.

But before we dig into metrics and results — or really a lack thereof — let’s take a minute to chat through Contenful’s business.

What does it do?

TechCrunch caught up with Contentful’s CEO, Steve Sloan (previously of Twilio and Bessemer), and its comms connect, Brian Spittler (previously of Podium), to dig more into its products.

Sloan explained Contentful by analogy, saying that as Twilio served the communications market and Stripe the payments space, Contentful wants to handle the world’s digital content. Yes, we’re talking APIs (application programming interface). Contentful has a handful of core APIs that allow for reading and writing content to its data buckets and making content available at the right time.

In more practical terms, Contentful doesn’t want to help companies build apps. Other companies are rather good at that. Instead, it wants to help customers’ apps load their in-app content very quickly, regardless of where their users are. You can now better understand the modestly aspirational Stripe and Twilio comparison; Contentful wants to take a piece of a developer’s workload, in this case delivering digital content to controlled applications, abstract it and deliver the functionality as an API. So as developers could simply use Twilio to make text messages appear around the world without coming to terms with global telephone providers, Contentful customers can avoid having to think about content delivery networks (CDNs) and global bandwidth for their content.

Now that we have a reasonable grasp of what Contentful does, let’s talk about growth:

 

No, that’s not an errant space. Contentful’s CEO declined to share essentially anything concerning its business growth, aside from that when Contentful raised its Series E it was around an “inflection point” for the company. This irked me a little; we know that the company had a good 2020 and likely a good 2021 thus far. Why? Because Tiger didn’t invest in a $175 million round at a new, higher price for Contentful on the back of mediocre results.

To his credit, Sloan was willing to explain why his company decided to avoid sharing growth information. Per the CEO, when a company discloses pieces of growth data over time, folks will go back when they go public and compare data to claims. And, he added, given that definitions can change, sharing can be more bother than it’s worth. There’s some truth to this: Some startups will claim profitability, for example, only to gently backpedal and explain that what they meant was really adjusted EBITDA, say, or positive operating cash flow.

The solution, of course, is for growth-stage startups to share GAAP-ready data with the media when they want our attention. After all, Contentful is aiming toward an IPO and is probably already learning to get its books in proper order. GAAP results are possible! And to be fair to Contentful, many startups decline to share useful data about their performance when courting media attention, often at the request of their investors; that we journalists of the world have to then deal with other investors complaining to us that the media is too fixated on funding rounds as progress points is a distinct, if closely related, matter.

Why do we think that Contentful is targeting an eventual public debut? Because companies tend not to raise nine figures at 10-figure valuations if they are hoping for a quick exit. The unicorn is now too expensive for anyone but the largest tech companies to buy; ergo it intends to go public. And, yes, we would go back and check claimed results against historical GAAP data in its S-1 if we were able to. That’s research! And fact-checking!

Gripes aside, Sloan shared employee growth expectations in a broad manner. Contentful is around 600 people today, split between its hubs in Denver, Berlin and San Francisco. Over the next two years, it intends to double (or a bit more than double) that headcount. Pull out your pencils and come up with your own revenue guesses based on that. The correct answer is present-day ARR somewhere between $75 and $75 million. Good luck.

Looking ahead, Contentful sells to three main customer buckets, per its CEO: midmarket customers, enterprise customers and venture-backed startups that intend to get big. Given that all of those are either pursuing digital transformation work or are digitally native, we presume that Contentful’s market will remain fertile for some time. That implies a winsome total addressable market for the company to sell into, implying ample future growth opportunities. Let’s see what it can get done with $175 million more.

When it comes to software to help IT manage workers’ devices wherever they happen to be, enterprises have long been spoiled for choice — a situation that has come in especially handy in the last 18 months, when many offices globally have gone remote and people have logged into their systems from home. But the same can’t really be said for small and medium enterprises: as with so many other aspects of tech, they’ve long been overlooked when it comes to building modern IT management solutions tailored to their size and needs.

But there are signs of that changing. Today, a startup called Atera that has been building remote, and low-cost, predictive IT management solutions specifically for organizations with less than 1,000 employees, is announcing a funding round of $77 million — a sign of the demand in the market, and Atera’s own success in addressing it. The investment values Atera at $500 million, the company confirmed.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has amassed some 7,000 customers to date, managing millions of endpoints — computers and other devices connected to them — across some 90 countries, providing real-time diagnostics across the datapoints generated by those devices to predict problems with hardware, software and network, or with security issues.

Atera’s aim is to use the funding both to continue building out that customer footprint, and to expand its product — specifically adding more functionality to the AI that it currently uses (and for which Atera has been granted patents) to run predictive analytics, one of the technologies that today are part and parcel of solutions targeting larger enterprises but typically are absent from much of the software out there aimed at SMBs.

“We are in essence democratizing capabilities that exist for enterprises but not for the other half of the economy, SMBs,” said Gil Pekelman, Atera’s CEO, in an interview.

The funding is being led by General Atlantic, and it is notable for being only the second time that Atera has ever raised money — the first was earlier this year, a $25 million round from K1 Investment Management, which is also in this latest round. Before this year, Atera, which was founded in 2016, turned profitable in 2017 and then intentionally went out of profit in 2019 as it used cash from its balance sheet to grow. Through all of that, it was bootstrapped. (And it still has cash from that initial round earlier this year.)

As Pekelman — who co-founded the company with Oshri Moyal (CTO) — describes it, Atera’s approach to remote monitoring and management, as the space is typically called, starts first with software clients installed at the endpoints that connect into a network, which give IT managers the ability to monitor a network, regardless of the actual physical range, as if it’s located in a single office. Around that architecture, Atera essentially monitors and collects “datapoints” covering activity from those devices — currently taking in some 40,000 datapoints per second.

To be clear, these datapoints are not related to what a person is working on, or any content at all, but how the devices behave, and the diagnostics that Atera amasses and focuses on cover three main areas: hardware performance, networking and software performance and security. Through this, Atera’s system can predict when something might be about to go wrong with a machine, or why a network connection might not be working as it should, or if there is some suspicious behavior that might need a security-oriented response. It supplements its work in the third area with integrations with third-party security software — Bitdefender and Acronis among them — and by issuing updated security patches for devices on the network.

The whole system is built to be run in a self-service way. You buy Atera’s products online, and there are no salespeople involved — in fact most of its marketing today is done through Facebook and Google, Pekelman said, which is one area where it will continue to invest. This is one reason why it’s not really targeted larger enterprises (the others are the level of customization that would be needed; as well as more sophisticated service level agreements). But it is also the reason why Atera is so cheap: it costs $89 per month per IT technician, regardless of the number of endpoints that are being managed.

“Our constituencies are up to 1,000 employees, which is a world that was in essence quite neglected up to now,” Pekelman said. “The market we are targeting and that we care about are these smaller guys and they just don’t have tools like these today.” Since model is $89 dollars per month per technician using the software, it means that a company with 500 people with four technicians is paying $356 per month to manage their networks, peanuts in the greater scheme of IT services, and one reason why Atera has caught on as more and more employees have gone remote, and are looking like they will stay that way.

And the fact that this model is thriving is also one of the reason and investors are interested.

“Atera has developed a compelling all-in-one platform that provides immense value for its customer base, and we are thrilled to be supporting the company in this important moment of its growth trajectory,” said Alex Crisses, MD, Global Head of New Investment Sourcing and Co-Head of Emerging Growth at General Atlantic, in a statement. “We are excited to work with a category-defining Israeli company, extending General Atlantic’s presence in the country’s cutting-edge technology sector and marking our fifth investment in the region. We look forward to partnering with Gil, Oshri, and the Atera team to help the company realize its vision.”

Pharmacies in Africa struggle with access to finance, but inventory management is really what bogs them down. How do pharmaceutical retailers know how much stock they need? How do they know which products to stock at a given time? How do they know what products aren’t selling?

At the moment, there’s not enough data to answer these questions. Cash gets tied up; there are more or fewer products than are needed at a particular time. If it’s the former, they run a risk of selling expired products. If it’s the latter, patients can’t get what they need.

Field Intelligence is digitizing this supply-chain process to help African pharmacies sell better. The company, which started in 2015, was government-focused and tried to tackle the challenges facing the public health supply chain in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Moreland said he noticed that independent pharmacies in Abuja faced similar challenges to the government-owned ones. After building a SaaS platform to manage complex and large-scale pharmaceutical distribution for the government, the company decided to branch out into the private space.

In trying to solve that supply-chain problem, Field Intelligence shifted from strictly being a software company to become a pharmaceutical distributor using technology to reimagine how the value chain works. 

Field Intelligence launched Shelf Life in 2017 as the standalone product to handle this transition. Up until now, they had operations in Abuja, Lagos and Nairobi. The product aims to solve the inventory problem across Africa’s $65 billion pharmaceutical market. Today, the company announced its expansion into 11 cities across Nigeria and Kenya. The seven cities in Nigeria include Delta, Edo, Enugu, Kaduna, Kano, Kwara and Rivers. In Kenya, it’s Eldoret, Kisumi, Mombasa and Naivasha. The expansion will build on Field Intelligence’s more than 700 existing pharmacies, which have served over 1.4 million patients so far.

Shelf Life takes the burden and risk of inventory off the pharmacies. It manages forecasting, quality assurance, fulfillment and inventory management via a subscription service. Pharmacies sell Shelf Life-supplied goods on consignment through a pay-as-you-sell program, avoiding expiry risk and accessing a cheaper alternative to working capital finance. The company claims that this model allowed pharmacies to grow an average of 25% CAGR.

“We launched Shelf Life in 2017 to allow pharmacies to outsource their supply chain to us. And it really just grew very organically from there,” Moreland said. “And as we built up, we expanded down to Lagos and eventually to Nairobi to see if it would work in East Africa in that context, and it did. We haven’t looked back since then. The future of the business is in the private pharmacy market.” 

Field Intelligence concluded its first round of outside capital in March last year, a $3.6 million Series A. The money was raised for expansion, but the pandemic stalled that plan. Field Intelligence went back to work by the end of Q4 2020 and planted the initial seeds of what has grown until this moment.

Importance of data in Field Intelligence’s operations

This expansion comes a year after the company experienced rapid sales and Shelf Life membership subscriptions. Sales grew by 47% in Nigeria and 65% in Kenya, selling over 586,950 products in 63 different product categories.

By using data to optimize predictions and identify irregularities in the market, Field Intelligence met the demands for prescription and over-the-counter drugs. But how does it receive and aggregate this data?

“We see that as a math problem. And that starts with having really great data about what’s selling across a wide number of locations and different seasons, across a wide formulary of products,” the CEO said.

When Field Intelligence introduces Shelf Life to a pharmacy, it takes over its supply chain and inventory management processes. The company has fulfillment partners to manage the pharmacy’s stock counts, inventory management and merchandising.

Data about stock positions and movements at the retail level comes from a wide array of locations. Thus, the company can build a proprietary dataset that shows pharmacies in real-time, providing insights into demand. With that, Field Intelligence provides visibility and control of pharmaceutical procurement and inventory management. This eliminates frequent over- and understocking; pharmacies can change products or prices based on the information available.

The fulfillment partners operate an asset-light model, which Moreland said allowed the company “to build a scalable and intelligent distribution service that operates lean but yet creates a lot of value for the patients and retailers.”

“I can say that our level of the value chain here as sort of this tech-enabled distributor, there’s nobody that operates at this level of the supply chain in so many cities,” he added. 

Shelf Life is currently being used in more than 700 pharmacies across Nigeria and Kenya. The company says Nigeria has more than 4,500 registered pharmacies and over 15,000 drugstores; while Kenya has 6,000 registered pharmacies. So there’s plenty of market share to capture. By next year, Field Intelligence plans to surpass 2,000 Shelf Life pharmacies and drugstores. By 2025, the company is targeting 12,000 pharmacies and drugstores.

Moreland said that the company has grown 5x in terms of recurring revenue, adding that Shelf Life has sold more drugs and served more patients in the last three months than its first three years of business. 

While Field Intelligence is looking to tackle inventory management with Shelf Life, Moreland believes the company is also effectively solving a finance problem too because it provides an alternative to traditional financing options by lowering the cost of running a pharmacy.

“One of the big value propositions for us is that because we are selling on consignment, we free up a lot of working capital for the retailer. So in the market, we’re broadly seen as a financial services provider and a form of alternative finance for our pharmacies. And I think it’s a big part of our story because when you compare the cost of joining Shelf Life to accessing the equivalent amount of working capital from microfinance or traditional bank, even concessionary lenders, we can be 60 to 80% cheaper with far more value-added services,” he said.

Pharmacies in Africa struggle with access to finance, but inventory management is really what bogs them down. How do pharmaceutical retailers know how much stock they need? How do they know which products to stock at a given time? How do they know what products aren’t selling?

At the moment, there’s not enough data to answer these questions. Cash gets tied up; there are more or fewer products than are needed at a particular time. If it’s the former, they run a risk of selling expired products. If it’s the latter, patients can’t get what they need.

Field Intelligence is digitizing this supply-chain process to help African pharmacies sell better. The company, which started in 2015, was government-focused and tried to tackle the challenges facing the public health supply chain in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Moreland said he noticed that independent pharmacies in Abuja faced similar challenges to the government-owned ones. After building a SaaS platform to manage complex and large-scale pharmaceutical distribution for the government, the company decided to branch out into the private space.

In trying to solve that supply-chain problem, Field Intelligence shifted from strictly being a software company to become a pharmaceutical distributor using technology to reimagine how the value chain works. 

Field Intelligence launched Shelf Life in 2017 as the standalone product to handle this transition. Up until now, they had operations in Abuja, Lagos and Nairobi. The product aims to solve the inventory problem across Africa’s $65 billion pharmaceutical market. Today, the company announced its expansion into 11 cities across Nigeria and Kenya. The seven cities in Nigeria include Delta, Edo, Enugu, Kaduna, Kano, Kwara and Rivers. In Kenya, it’s Eldoret, Kisumi, Mombasa and Naivasha. The expansion will build on Field Intelligence’s more than 700 existing pharmacies, which have served over 1.4 million patients so far.

Shelf Life takes the burden and risk of inventory off the pharmacies. It manages forecasting, quality assurance, fulfillment and inventory management via a subscription service. Pharmacies sell Shelf Life-supplied goods on consignment through a pay-as-you-sell program, avoiding expiry risk and accessing a cheaper alternative to working capital finance. The company claims that this model allowed pharmacies to grow an average of 25% CAGR.

“We launched Shelf Life in 2017 to allow pharmacies to outsource their supply chain to us. And it really just grew very organically from there,” Moreland said. “And as we built up, we expanded down to Lagos and eventually to Nairobi to see if it would work in East Africa in that context, and it did. We haven’t looked back since then. The future of the business is in the private pharmacy market.” 

Field Intelligence concluded its first round of outside capital in March last year, a $3.6 million Series A. The money was raised for expansion, but the pandemic stalled that plan. Field Intelligence went back to work by the end of Q4 2020 and planted the initial seeds of what has grown until this moment.

Importance of data in Field Intelligence’s operations

This expansion comes a year after the company experienced rapid sales and Shelf Life membership subscriptions. Sales grew by 47% in Nigeria and 65% in Kenya, selling over 586,950 products in 63 different product categories.

By using data to optimize predictions and identify irregularities in the market, Field Intelligence met the demands for prescription and over-the-counter drugs. But how does it receive and aggregate this data?

“We see that as a math problem. And that starts with having really great data about what’s selling across a wide number of locations and different seasons, across a wide formulary of products,” the CEO said.

When Field Intelligence introduces Shelf Life to a pharmacy, it takes over its supply chain and inventory management processes. The company has fulfillment partners to manage the pharmacy’s stock counts, inventory management and merchandising.

Data about stock positions and movements at the retail level comes from a wide array of locations. Thus, the company can build a proprietary dataset that shows pharmacies in real-time, providing insights into demand. With that, Field Intelligence provides visibility and control of pharmaceutical procurement and inventory management. This eliminates frequent over- and understocking; pharmacies can change products or prices based on the information available.

The fulfillment partners operate an asset-light model, which Moreland said allowed the company “to build a scalable and intelligent distribution service that operates lean but yet creates a lot of value for the patients and retailers.”

“I can say that our level of the value chain here as sort of this tech-enabled distributor, there’s nobody that operates at this level of the supply chain in so many cities,” he added. 

Shelf Life is currently being used in more than 700 pharmacies across Nigeria and Kenya. The company says Nigeria has more than 4,500 registered pharmacies and over 15,000 drugstores; while Kenya has 6,000 registered pharmacies. So there’s plenty of market share to capture. By next year, Field Intelligence plans to surpass 2,000 Shelf Life pharmacies and drugstores. By 2025, the company is targeting 12,000 pharmacies and drugstores.

Moreland said that the company has grown 5x in terms of recurring revenue, adding that Shelf Life has sold more drugs and served more patients in the last three months than its first three years of business. 

While Field Intelligence is looking to tackle inventory management with Shelf Life, Moreland believes the company is also effectively solving a finance problem too because it provides an alternative to traditional financing options by lowering the cost of running a pharmacy.

“One of the big value propositions for us is that because we are selling on consignment, we free up a lot of working capital for the retailer. So in the market, we’re broadly seen as a financial services provider and a form of alternative finance for our pharmacies. And I think it’s a big part of our story because when you compare the cost of joining Shelf Life to accessing the equivalent amount of working capital from microfinance or traditional bank, even concessionary lenders, we can be 60 to 80% cheaper with far more value-added services,” he said.

The tyranny of the Excel spreadsheet continues, and especially in rostering staff. Nowhere is this more acutely felt in today’s COVID-pressured hospital wards, which are now depleted not just by the disease but by staff burnout from patchy-over or under-scheduling of staff hours. Two doctors realized this and decided to create a startup.

Patchwork Health has now raised £3.5m from Praetura Ventures and BMJ New Ventures, the investment arm of BMJ (global healthcare knowledge provider and publisher of The BMJ).

Founded in 2016 by NHS doctors Anas Nader and Jing Ouyang, the platform is now used by over 70 NHS sites to fill vacant shifts and offer staff flexible working. It couldn’t have come sooner: The NHS currently has 90,000 vacancies and 1 in 5 staff are said to be considering quitting due to stress and exhaustion.

Patchwork replaces this spreadsheet with a dashboard which predicts when temporary staff will be needed. Shifts are broadcast to an app and temporary staff use the app to select the shifts which suits them. The passporting of credentials, HR paperwork, and payments are all handled through the same system. Full-time healthcare workers can have their personal preferences reflected in their rotas without leaving NHS wards with staffing gaps, the startup says.

Dr Nader said: “We’re already partnering with over 70 NHS sites to tackle the root causes of burnout, offer full-time and temporary staff more choices, and create stronger staffing foundations for hospitals. Through our technology and services, flexible work and safely staffed wards can go hand in hand.”

David Foreman, Managing Director at Praetura Ventures and Non-Executive Director of Patchwork, added: “From the moment we met Anas and Jing, we could see the passion for their business. Patchwork is helping to solve a staffing crisis in the NHS. They’ve made real strides over the last 18 months and have the potential to make seismic changes in the way we organise staff in one of the world’s largest healthcare systems.”