Medikea, a Tanzanian healthtech startup, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding to expand a healthcare network that mixes digital consultations with bodily clinics, diagnostic labs, pharmacies, and specialist care.
Baobab Network, Catalyst Fund, develoPPP Ventures, Madica, Impacc, Hustle Fund, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Madiro, Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, and an unnamed angel investor backed the funding spherical.
The elevate comes as healthtech startups throughout Africa proceed to face a troublesome funding setting. Healthtech corporations raised just $18 million, or 1.3% of the $1.44 billion African startups secured within the first half of 2026.
Medikea says it has already used a part of the $1.2 million to expand its clinic network, opening two new amenities in Arusha and Morogoro and bringing its complete to 4 clinics throughout Tanzania.
The firm mentioned the remaining capital will fund its subsequent part of enlargement, together with new clinics, key hires, expertise and product improvement, operations, gross sales, advertising and marketing, and progress.
“Building this way is harder, and we chose it deliberately,” Dr Elvis Silayo, Medikea’s co-founder and chief government officer, mentioned in an announcement. “If you layer technology on top of a broken system, you are digitising inefficiency. You inherit someone else’s costs and someone else’s quality problems, and you can’t scale past them. We rebuilt the parts we depend on, so that we can deliver a better experience at a lower price and still hold a fair margin.”
Founded in 2022 by Silayo and a crew of medical doctors and software program engineers, Medikea began with the concept that expertise might make healthcare simpler to entry, however realised the issue went past digital entry, as sufferers had to transfer between amenities relying on the scenario. Private healthcare provided an alternate, however was too costly for many individuals paying out of pocket. That led Medikea to construct what it describes as a technology-enabled healthcare supply system.
How Medikea works
In Medikea’s present iteration, a affected person can use the app to seek the advice of a health care provider just about, go to one in every of Medikea’s clinics when an examination is required, get exams at its diagnostic lab, fill a prescription at its pharmacy, and return to digital look after follow-up. Its digital medical information join these interactions and permit the affected person’s historical past to comply with them. The firm mentioned it operates specialist outpatient companies overlaying paediatrics, ladies’s well being, dermatology, fertility, and power illness care.
“Healthcare is one large market made up of services that all depend on each other. If you build only one part, you depend on partners for the rest, and you lose control over what matters most to patients: trust, reliability, speed and price,” Silayo advised TechCabal in an electronic mail response. “There is a lot of talk about healthcare being broken. Digitising a broken system just brings all its problems to the cloud. What needs fixing first is how care is delivered. Then technology makes it efficient and scalable.”
Madikea’s enterprise mannequin is extra capital-intensive than typical digital well being platforms; it entails working the clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies and its digital service. The firm believes proudly owning these elements of the healthcare journey also can make the enterprise extra worthwhile because it scales.
“The two channels have different costs, and combining them lets us use each where it makes the most sense,” Silayo mentioned. “The clinic is where trust is built and where examinations, tests, and procedures happen. Virtual care makes follow-up easier and less costly to deliver, and lets each clinic serve patients well beyond its walls. Together, they let us keep care continuous and manage costs across the whole patient journey.”
The vertically built-in healthcare mannequin places Medikea in competitors with Tanzanian digital-health gamers, together with TanzMED, AfyaCall, and LyfPlus, in addition to conventional clinics. Across Africa, Uganda’s Rocket Health and Kenya-based Zuri Health, which makes use of partnerships and cell infrastructure to prolong its attain, additionally use the identical strategy to healthcare. Medikea says proudly owning the infrastructure offers it larger management over high quality, pricing, scientific workflows, and the affected person expertise.
Medikea earns income by means of fee-for-service funds for consultations, specialist companies, diagnostics, and pharmacy merchandise. It additionally gives subscription programmes for sufferers who require ongoing care, starting with power illness administration. Medikea mentioned it has served greater than 50,000 sufferers because it began and at present has a scientific crew of greater than 40 individuals. It goals to serve greater than 100,000 sufferers over the subsequent 12 months and develop from 4 clinics to 10 throughout Tanzania by the tip of 2027, earlier than increasing into different markets within the area.
“Our biggest lesson is that good doctors and a convenient app are not enough on their own. The whole journey has to work together,” Silayo mentioned. “We are not simply opening more clinics. We are replicating a model in which technology, clinical teams and facilities work together around the patient.”
Medikea plans to expand by opening and working its personal clinics, though additionally it is open to buying current amenities. For now, the corporate is targeted on proving that its mannequin can scale sustainably in Tanzania earlier than coming into different markets within the area.
“Our goal is not to enter as many countries as quickly as possible,” Silayo mentioned. “It is to build a model that works in Tanzania, then replicate it selectively where it can make a real difference and build a sustainable business.”
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