Meet the pharmacist who taught himself to code and raised over $17 million to fix Africa’s pharmaceutical supply chain

Long before Kessington Samuel Okwuada started Remedial Health, he was already building businesses.

As a teenager, he taught himself to code. At university, while studying pharmacy in the UK, he built technology and e-commerce ventures, eventually selling businesses before returning to Nigeria to explore opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry.

The experiences gave him an unusual combination of skills for someone entering healthcare entrepreneurship. He understood medicine from his training as a pharmacist, but he also knew technology could simplify how businesses operated.

When he began working in pharmaceutical distribution, he encountered a problem that brought both interests together. Pharmacies and hospitals struggled to obtain genuine medicines at reliable prices, while the supply chains connecting manufacturers to patients remained fragmented and difficult to navigate.

Okwuada believed technology could help change that. He founded Remedial Health in 2021 to make pharmaceutical procurement more reliable and accessible. The company has since developed a platform that helps pharmacies and hospitals source medicines, manage inventory, access financing and arrange deliveries.

Backed by investors including QED Investors, Ventures Platform, Tencent, Gaingels and Y Combinator, Remedial Health raised $1 million in pre-seed funding in 2022, followed by a $4.4 million seed round and $12 million in Series A and equity-debt financing in 2023.

But the idea began years earlier, when Okwuada questioned how he could combine his education, his interest in technology, and his desire to build businesses.

Pharmacy was not Okwuada’s first choice. He wanted to become a pilot, but his parents discouraged him because he was their first son. Medicine and engineering did not interest him either, so pharmacy became a middle ground between what he wanted and what his parents expected.

But while pharmacy was what he studied, technology was what really caught his attention. He had always been curious about how things worked.

Okwuada had been coding since he was 13, following technology companies and watching young entrepreneurs build businesses of their own.

“I always knew I was an entrepreneur as I loved building things,” he said. “I would always break apart my toy cars as a child to rebuild them differently.”

That same curiosity eventually found its way into the businesses he built. At the University of East Anglia, where he studied pharmacy, Okwuada began turning his interest in technology into something more practical.

In his first year, he built Macbundler, a platform that helped people discover Mac applications while giving developers another way to reach customers. The business generated more than £120,000 in revenue before he sold it to a US company four years later, as Apple’s launch of the Mac App Store changed the market.

In his second year, he launched Oyoyo, an online fashion business that helped Nigerians buy products from UK retailers. The platform converted prices into naira, added shipping costs and arranged delivery through a discounted DHL deal.

The business gained traction, generating more than £350,000 in lifetime sales. But growth brought challenges. Okwuada was receiving more than 20 deliveries a day at his university dormitory, attracting complaints from the university.

After about 18 months, he sold Oyoyo to a private investor because it was taking too much time away from his studies. The experience taught him to recognise opportunities and act quickly, but also to understand when it was time to move on, especially when the market changed or the demands became too much.

But there was still something he needed to understand. Building technology was one thing; understanding the industry he wanted to serve was another.

When Okwuada returned to Nigeria, he took unpaid internships to learn how the pharmaceutical market actually worked before starting another business.

That decision would lay the groundwork for Remedial Health, the health-tech company he would go on to build to address inefficiencies in Nigeria’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

Okwuada’s pharmaceutical experience eventually revealed an opportunity that connected his education with his technical skills.

In 2016, he started a pharmaceutical import business, bringing medicines from India for distribution in Nigeria. The work exposed him to persistent problems involving availability, pricing and counterfeit products.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought those weaknesses into sharper focus. Disruptions to pharmaceutical supply chains left pharmacies and patients struggling to obtain medicines, particularly when traditional sources of supply became inaccessible.

Okwuada began thinking about how medicines were distributed in the UK, where he had completed his pre-registration training.

“I remembered my pre-registration year in the UK where I could order right from the pharmacy computer whilst dispensing, with two daily deliveries to the pharmacy by suppliers,” he said.

“I didn’t need to leave the pharmacy floor or worry about availability and counterfeits.”

He had seen how medicines were stored and handled in parts of Nigeria’s wholesale markets, including Idumota in Lagos. Poor storage and handling could compromise product quality, while weaknesses in distribution created opportunities for counterfeiters.

In 2021, he founded Remedial Health to help address those problems through a more organised procurement and distribution system.

Remedial Health did not begin with all the services it offers today. The company initially sold its own-brand medicines, manufactured under contract in markets including India. That gave it an entry point into the market, but customers soon began asking for products outside its initial range.

“When customers started asking for products outside our range, we started third-party distribution,” Okwuada said.

The business then developed technology to help pharmacies manage orders and inventory. As the platform evolved, financing became a natural extension of the procurement service.

For many independent pharmacies, access to medicines is closely tied to access to working capital. A pharmacy may know which products it needs but lack the cash to buy sufficient inventory while meeting other operating expenses.

Traditional bank financing can be difficult to access, particularly for smaller businesses that cannot meet collateral requirements or navigate lengthy application processes.

Remedial Health began allowing eligible pharmacies to obtain inventory without necessarily paying the full amount upfront. Depending on the customer, the pharmacy may put down no deposit or contribute as much as 50%, with the company financing the balance.

“Because we’re a B2B business, we can give pharmacies inventory without asking for cash up front or at delivery,” Okwuada said.

He says the arrangement has helped some customers expand their businesses and open additional branches. At one point, he attributed the opening of 30 new stores to the company’s financing support.

The company also tracked repayment performance. Okwuada reported an early repayment rate of 97.5%, with the remaining 2.5% of customers paying late. As economic conditions deteriorated, demand for financing increased by more than 50% over several months.

For him, the service addresses a fundamental constraint on small businesses. “One of the main challenges in doing business in Africa is getting credit,” he said.

Selling medicines is not the same as selling ordinary consumer goods. Pharmacies need confidence that the products they receive are genuine, appropriately sourced and handled by reliable suppliers.

Okwuada says Remedial Health vets manufacturers before bringing them onto its platform, checking their legitimacy and the relevant certifications before supplying products to pharmacies and hospitals.

But trust also depends on making the service practical for the people expected to use it.

“We don’t force anyone onto the system, because we don’t assume every pharmacy has a computer and constant power,” he said.

Customers can place orders through their phones, while those without smartphones can order through the company’s network of agents.

The company has also had to contend with operational challenges. Bank transfer difficulties, fuel shortages, logistics costs, poor roads and regulatory processes have all affected its operations.

Okwuada says the removal of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy sharply increased logistics costs, at one point tripling them, while the company tried to limit the impact on customers.

Registering four of its own-brand products with Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control also took about two years, according to the founder.

Medicine prices present another challenge. With a large share of medicines consumed in Africa imported, exchange-rate movements and international economic conditions can influence the cost of supplying products locally.

These pressures make building a pharmaceutical distribution business more complicated than simply developing software that connects buyers and sellers.

Remedial Health’s growth helped it attract institutional investment. The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch and raised $1 million in pre-seed funding, followed by a $4.4 million seed round in September 2022. Okwuada says sales volumes had increased by 600% since January that year, helping support the case for fundraising.

In 2023, the company secured another $12 million in Series A and equity-debt financing.

For Okwuada, the lesson is that founders should focus on building a business before making fundraising the main objective.

“Startups should focus on scaling the business and delivering value before looking to raise funding,” he said.

When assessing startups, he looks first at evidence that customers want what the business offers.

“The main signal is traction — either revenue, active sticky users, growth rate,” he said.

“Revenue is always king, as they say and should be the main metric, as the goal of any business is first to make money.”

The same emphasis on measurable results informs how he thinks about Remedial Health’s own performance. Beyond the number of pharmacies served, or states reached, he tracks revenue, growth and the volume of genuine medicines supplied.

By 2023, the company reported serving more than 5,000 pharmacies and hospitals across 34 Nigerian states.

Despite its expansion, Remedial Health has not rushed into other countries. Okwuada says the immediate priority is to deepen the company’s presence in Nigeria, where he estimated it had about 10% of its target market at the time of his remarks.

“We haven’t entered another country because we haven’t met the demand in Nigeria yet,” he said. “We want to be pan-Nigeria first.”

He believes establishing a significant position at home will make it easier to replicate the model in other West African markets.

Okwuada sees neighbourhood pharmacies as potential access points for a wider range of healthcare services, including doctor consultations, diagnostics and remote medical assessments.

“Neighbourhood pharmacies are less than a 15-minute walk from people’s homes,” he said. “Adding diagnostics and a doctor to them, and bringing everything to the people, is how we really transform healthcare in Africa.”

For all the company’s technological ambitions and fundraising milestones, however, Okwuada returns to the problem that first motivated him: counterfeit medicines and the risks they pose to patients.

“Every pack we supply replaces one that might have been counterfeit, and saving even one life matters to me,” he said.

It is a goal that brings his journey full circle. The pharmacist who once questioned whether he belonged in a lecture hall is now using the skills he developed in pharmacy and technology to change how medicines reach the people who need them.