Nigeria’s Helium Health raises USD 10 million in Series A

In May 2020, CEO of Helium Health, Adegoke Olubusi announced that the healthtech start-up had batted away acquisitions offers and raised a USD 10 Million Series A round.

Launched in 2016, Helium Health is based in Lagos. The co-founders of the start-up are Dimeji Sofowora and Tito Ovia. Helium Health’s Electronic Medical Records/Hospital Management Information System (EMR/HMIS) product allows for hospitals, clinics and other healthcare institutions to go digital instantly. Helium Health provides cutting-edge technology to improve the organisation of records.

Asia Africa Investment & Consulting and Global Ventures led Series A round of funding. Y Combinator and Tencent also participated in the round. Tencent has also previously invested in Helium Health’s seed round in 2017 that raised USD 2 million.

Investors like Nobuhiko Ichimiya, the co-lead investor at AAIC and Noor Sweid, a general partner with Global Ventures has expressed their excitement over the investment. They are happy to be a part of the journey of digitising healthcare and making healthcare more accessible in Africa. This investment has occurred at a great time as there is a large increase in the demand of healthcare facilities in Africa due to COVID-19.

The funding will be used to expand to hire more workers and expand its market footprint to North and East Africa. It has expanded from Nigeria to Liberia and Ghana in the last couple of years. Till now, the total venture capital funding the start-up has raised is USD 12.12 million.

Helium Health, originally called One Medical, worked towards eliminating paper records in the healthcare industry but providing an automated and digitalised process. “It’s really about tackling three core problems that we see in the healthcare sector in Africa: inefficiency, fragmentation and a lack of data,” said Olubusi. In 2019, Helium Health announced that it was the largest EMR provider in not just Nigeria but in West Africa. It has a wide reach with 5,000 doctors across 107 hospitals that are managing over 150,000 patients per month.

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