Remedial Health lets Nigerian pharmacies stock medicine on credit
A pharmacist who coded as a teenager and built two student firms now runs a Nigerian supplier that gives eligible pharmacies stock with little or no deposit.
By
Kwame Asante
In brief
- Remedial Health was founded in 2021 by pharmacist Kessington Samuel Okwuada to help Nigerian pharmacies and hospitals source genuine medicines.
- The company raised $17.4 million across several funding stages.
- Eligible pharmacies may pay no deposit or up to 50%, with the balance financed by the company.
Before he founded a medicine supplier, Kessington Samuel Okwuada built and sold two businesses while still a pharmacy student in Britain. The path from those ventures to Nigeria’s pharmaceutical market explains why his company sells credit as well as drugs.
A founder who learned the market before building for it
Okwuada says he has been coding since he was 13, and he taught himself as a teenager. He later studied pharmacy at the University of East Anglia, where he built Macbundler. The venture generated more than £120,000 in revenue and was sold to a US company four years later. A second project, Oyoyo, was an online fashion business that let Nigerians buy from UK retailers. It logged more than £350,000 in lifetime sales and went to a private investor after about 18 months.
“I always knew I was an entrepreneur as I loved building things,”
Kessington Samuel Okwuada, founder of Remedial Health
Back in Nigeria, he did not jump straight into another startup. Unpaid internships were his way of learning how the country’s pharmaceutical market worked. In 2016 he began importing medicines from India to Nigeria, a business that exposed him to problems of availability, pricing and counterfeit products. He also recalled his pre-registration year in the UK, where he could order from the pharmacy computer while dispensing. In his words, “I didn’t need to leave the pharmacy floor or worry about availability and counterfeits.”
From own-brand drugs to a wider supply platform
According to Business Insider Africa, Okwuada founded Remedial Health in 2021 as a health-tech company aimed at inefficiencies in Nigeria’s pharmaceutical supply chain, helping pharmacies and hospitals find genuine medicines. The first offer was narrow: its own-brand medicines, made under contract in markets including India. Customer requests changed that. “When customers started asking for products outside our range, we started third-party distribution,” Okwuada said.
Beyond distribution, the company expanded into inventory management, order fulfilment and financing.
The scale investors have backed
The funding came after Remedial Health joined Y Combinator. The accelerator appears among the backers, alongside QED Investors, Ventures Platform, Tencent and Gaingels. The company reported that by 2023 it served more than 5,000 pharmacies and hospitals across 34 Nigerian states.
| Year | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Pre-seed | $1 million |
| 2023 | Seed | $4.4 million |
| 2023 | Series A and equity-debt financing | $12 million |
How pharmacies pay
Payment terms are the most distinctive part of the model. “Because we’re a B2B business, we can give pharmacies inventory without asking for cash up front or at delivery,” Okwuada said.
These performance figures are the founder’s own. He also says demand for financing rose by more than 50% over several months as economic conditions deteriorated. At one point, Okwuada credited the company’s financing support with the opening of 30 new stores.
Featured image. Source: Pexels. Credit: World Sikh Organization of Canada. License: Pexels License.
