PBR Life Sciences, a Techstars-backed healthcare knowledge analytics firm, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding. The corporate will use a part of the funds to spend money on AI infrastructure and develop into Ghana and Kenya.
The funding was raised from Launch Africa, Microtraction, Kaleo Ventures, Octerra Capital, Marula Sq., XA Africa, ARM Labs, and Techstars.
Based in 2015 by Ayodeji Alaran, PBR pivoted into large knowledge and analytics in 2021, offering multinational pharmacy teams like Sanofi with knowledge and insights to make knowledgeable choices—like product pricing, forecasting, and new product growth—within the African markets they function.
These pharmaceutical corporations typically wrestle with extreme manufacturing volumes as a consequence of a lack of expertise of precise market demand. PBR gathers anonymised knowledge—drug amount, costs, and the way continuously they’re bought—from numerous pharmacies to allow pharmaceutical corporations to raised match manufacturing with precise market demand.
PBR supplies pharmaceutical corporations, consulting companies, NGOs, and multilateral businesses with entry to this knowledge by way of pre-built AI-powered analytics dashboards. These dashboards permit customers to see market shares, product consumption patterns, and different insights throughout Nigeria and Ghana. PBS additionally affords a generative AI characteristic the place customers can ask questions and mechanically generate analytics.
As conventional drug discovery strategies shift in the direction of AI, there’s a threat of excluding sufferers from Africa as a consequence of a scarcity of native knowledge from the continent. PBS is fixing this drawback by gathering and offering distinctive knowledge factors about folks on the continent. The corporate plans to make use of AI for drug discovery by working carefully with sufferers in medical trials. PBS may even discover using blockchain for anonymization and randomization of healthcare knowledge sooner or later and develop into 10 extra African international locations.
“Being backed by among the most respected enterprise capital buyers and angels in Africa not solely evokes us as a crew to do extra however additional validates the very important want to shut the hole of insufficient real-world, healthcare large knowledge that can energy AI and innovation for the sector while unlocking world life sciences development that will likely be powered by the area,” stated Alaran.
PBR, which was one of many twelve (12) startups within the second cohort of the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator programme, serves corporations like Sanofi, Emzor, Roche, Worldwide Finance Company, and Mercs.
The corporate claims to have grown its income by 200% since 2023 however declined to share particular figures. PBS competes with corporations like IQVIA and Sanisphere which supply comparable companies. PBR makes cash by way of subscriptions, sale of unbiased studies, and session charges.