Nigeria’s MediSpark is building a robust African healthcare ecosystem

MediSpark, a Nigerian startup, bills itself as the “Truepill for Africa,” and the business is hard at work developing an ecosystem of APIs and SaaS solutions to synchronize data across Africa’s disparate healthcare systems.

Ugo Nwokoro and Gbenga Oyeniyi, who have known and worked together since 2016, created MediSpark. Nwokoro and his family have been in the healthcare industry for two generations, owning and operating hospitals, pharmacies, and laboratories. He is also a product manager and UX designer, and Oyeniyi has over ten years of programming experience, having built ed-tech platforms for colleges and secondary schools.

“We started working on MediSpark in 2017 after both working in a hospital together and witnessing the challenges ourselves,” Nwokoro said. “We released a rough MVP in 2018 and started selling. But we only went full-time in January this year when we decided we’d understood the market well enough, and were ready to build a second version of our product and raise money.”

Initially, Medispark provided software to hospitals, labs, and other healthcare organizations to help them manage their operations and retain digital records. Nwokoro explained that this was done so that its APIs would have something to link to, as these APIs are at the heart of the startup’s business.

“Our APIs will eliminate manual work by connecting hospitals to health insurers for automatic claim submission and settlement, researchers and governments for data extraction and payments, financiers for determining eligibility and issuing loans, and any mobile app willing to give patients visibility of their personal health records,” he said.

“Our primary goal is to enable frictionless transactions and large-scale data transfers.”

MediSpark facilitates these linkages independent of the digital records platform used by an organization, with the purpose of connecting Africa’s healthcare ecosystem.

“Our APIs will also be available to other EMR firms, allowing them to market our goods to their clients.” This accelerates the unification of Africa’s notoriously fragmented healthcare business, resulting in a resilient healthcare system for more than one billion Africans,” said Nwokoro.

So far, uptake has been “excellent,” with approximately 60 hospitals, pharmacies, and labs using its platform. MediSpark’s network has over 41,000 registered patients and over 1,200 medical professionals, and by the end of the year, it will connect 11 insurers.

MediSpark is in the process of gathering a $250,000 round of pre-seed funding, with roughly half of that amount already committed. Though rooted in Nigeria, it is concerned with Africa as a whole.

“We started in Nigeria, but we’re already growing beyond it.” “Our present fundraise will help us expand much more,” Nwokoro stated.

The firm generates money through three channels: SaaS subscription fees, transactional revenues, and data-as-a-product. According to Nwokoro, it is rapidly expanding.

“We saw a 400% increase in revenue between 2020 and 2021.” And revenue growth of more than 15% month on month. “We’ve been profitable from the start because of the lean strategy we took to growing the firm,” he stated.

It has, however, been difficult to penetrate and scale the market since there is a steep learning curve for medical professionals in Africa to adopt digital ways of working.

“However, once customers start using the product, the benefits become evident, and we begin to see further adoption of various items in our suite,” Nwokoro explained.