Ghanaian health-tech startup Redbird wins seed funding

The Imperial Innovation Venture Fund, a partnership with Newtown Partners, together with Johnson & Johnson Foundation, participated in a $1.5mn seed round for Ghana-based health tech startup, Redbird, bringing the total funding raised to date to $2mn.

Redbird enables patients in Ghana to easily manage their health via five-minute medical tests offered by community pharmacies. Patients can also access their digital health records from anywhere via Redbird’s app.

According to Redbird co-founder and CEO, Patrick Beattie, the future of disease burden in Africa will be chronic, with diseases such as diabetes projected to grow by 156% over the next 25 years. For patients and healthcare professionals to properly track and manage chronic illnesses, healthcare needs to be decentralised and much more convenient, with the ability for a patient’s health information to follow them wherever they go. Redbird aims to facilitate the growth of such a system by enabling easy access to convenient testing and ensuring doctors and patients can view the details of those test results at any time.

“We’re thrilled to work with Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures and Newtown Partners. Newtown and Imperial’s expertise in African supply chains, coupled with Johnson & Johnson’s long-standing commitment to improve care for the most vulnerable populations through technology, create a strong support for our vision of revolutionising health monitoring,” says Beattie.

Today, patients can go to any Redbird partner pharmacy – of which there are over 350 in Ghana – and register for the platform. They can then access any of 10 available rapid tests, which are performed instantly at a partner pharmacy, and receive results within minutes. These results are saved to their personal Redbird health record, which can be accessed by the patients via the app or at any partner pharmacy. The team also aims to provide doctors with access to these health records under patients’ consent, providing a more complete picture of a patient’s history.

Llew Claasen, managing partner of Newtown Partners notes: “We’re excited about Redbird’s decentralised business model that enables rapid diagnostic testing at the point of primary care in community pharmacies in Ghana. Redbird’s digital health record platform has the potential to drive significant value to the broader healthcare value chain and is a vital step toward improving healthcare outcomes in Africa. We look forward to supporting the team as they prove out their business model and scale across the African continent.”

The funding will be used to grow Redbird’s operations within Ghana and to expand to new markets.

Redbird officially launched in Ghana in August 2018 and was accepted into the Alchemist Accelerator in Silicon Valley as part of the April 2018 cohort, as well as to Founders Factory Africa in April 2020.

The Redbird team