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Medikea, a Dar es Salaam-based vertically integrated healthcare company, today announced it has closed a $1.2 million pre-Seed funding round.
The round was raised through successive closes, with early backing from Baobab Network, Catalyst Fund, and develoPPP Ventures, followed by Madica, Impacc, Hustle Fund, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Madiro, Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, and one angel investor.
“Catalyst Fund backed Medikea early because we saw an opportunity not just to digitise healthcare access, but to build a more affordable, continuous and climate-resilient model of outpatient care. By combining clinics, diagnostics, pharmacy and virtual care, Elvis and the team are building a scalable model better equipped to serve communities facing growing climate-related health risks,” said Maxime Bayen, Partner at Catalyst Fund.
Founded by a team of doctors and software engineers, Medikea was born out of a frustration that its co-founder and CEO, Dr. Elvis Silayo, observed firsthand in Tanzania’s healthcare system. Patients were often moving between separate facilities for consultations, tests and medicines, with no single record connecting the journey.
Public facilities carried a large share of demand, while private care remained out of reach for the majority paying out of pocket. As a result, many simply delayed treatment or self-medicated at a pharmacy counter. In order to solve this, Medikea built itself by owning the delivery of care rather than designing software on top of existing providers.
The company employs a salaried clinical team of more than 40, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists and laboratory technicians, who operate its own pharmacies and build its technology in-house. A patient can begin a consultation at any hour, visit a clinic when a physical examination is required, collect their prescription from a Medikea pharmacy and follow up online, with one record tracing the entire patient journey.
Alongside primary care, the company runs specialist services including paediatrics, women’s health, dermatology, fertility, and chronic disease clinics.
“Building this way is harder, and we chose it deliberately. 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,” said Dr. Silayo, co-founder and CEO of Medikea.
This business model has its strengths. From consultations, diagnostics, to specialist services and pharmacy, Medikea earns across the entire patient journey. It also serves both out-of-pocket patients and insured members, with partnerships including the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), Jubilee Insurance, Assemble Insurance and GA Insurance.
In a statement, the company confirmed that it has served more than 50,000 patients to date and has opened two new clinics — Arusha and Morogoro — alongside the original clinics in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma.
In addition to owning the entire patient journey, Dr. Silayo observes that patients who first meet a doctor in person are more willing to consult that doctor online afterwards. “Most digital health companies try to win patients online first, and it is a hard sell, because trust in this market is built face to face. The clinic is what makes telemedicine work,” he said.
The fresh capital will go towards product and technology development, opening of six additional clinics, expansion of the team, and specialist services. Medikea aims to serve 100,000 patients over the next twelve months while focusing on owning and operating each new clinic outright. Dr. Silayo says they are evaluating partnerships but remain open to acquiring existing clinics if it is faster than building from scratch.
It also intends to prove the repeatability of its clinic economics and the consistency of its clinical quality in Tanzania before taking the model into other African markets with fragmented care, affordability pressures and difficult-to-navigate systems.
