The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Oct 2021

RecoMed operates a technologically advanced online marketplace and booking platform that links patients, providers, and other industry participants and enables scheduling via phone, tablet, or computer. The platform aggregates channels including web search, medical aids, and life insurers to give providers access to patient bookings that generate significant volume. RecoMed books and confirms over 100,000 bookings monthly, enables more than 250,000 unique patient visits, and is used by more than 3,000 healthcare professionals. After receiving funding from Eisai the company increased its revenue by 150% in 2023. The investment will be used to enhance technology, drive awareness, and build a more robust digital healthcare journey, with an initial focus on becoming the first digital connection-to-care platform addressing breast cancer. Eisai's involvement aligns with its recent entry into the African market and a shared objective of using digital platforms to optimize the patient experience. RecoMed is a South African-founded online healthcare marketplace and booking platform that enables digital patient bookings into healthcare facilities across South Africa. Its platform aggregates a large selection of providers and integrates with most Practice Management Applications to provide instant booking capability, and it counts enterprise customers such as Discovery, Mediclinic, Dis-Chem and Medicross. RecoMed helped power Covid-19 vaccine booking platforms for Discovery Health and Mediclinic, which together accounted for over 550,000 bookings. The company reports over 150,000 bookings per month and facilitates roughly R250 million of healthcare spend annually. After becoming the leader in South Africa, RecoMed plans to launch its platform in Kenya in January 2022 and to roll out tailored new products to increase market share. Leadership emphasizes industry partnerships and broad integrations as drivers of practitioner and patient adoption.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

PawaPay is a U.K.-based, Africa-focused payments company that collapses telecom operators' mobile-money integrations into a single API for businesses. Its core product lets merchants access mobile-money systems from providers such as AirtelTigo, Econet, MTN, Safaricom, Orange and Vodafone to send and receive payments. The company says it handles over 10 million transactions per week and operates in beta across 10 African countries (Cameroon, DRC, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia). PawaPay spun off last year from online sports betting company betPawa and is led by CEO Nikolai Barnwell. It plans to scale its operational presence, recruit talent, expand into new markets and go live across 30–40 telco integrations. PawaPay emphasizes full regulation and licensing in each market and manages local operations, compliance, regulatory cover and bank accounts to provide a stable product for high-volume mobile-money payments.