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In February 2017, Silicon Valley-based Unitus Impact has finished a $6.3 million (€5.98M) Series A round financing in mClinica, a eHealth start-up based in Singapore.

MClinica is growing in the health tech marketplace. The firm plans to use its new funds to expand its operations in Southeast Asia and even worldwide.

Mobile app purpose: collecting relevant health data in Southeast Asia by connecting pharmacies on a single platform to help industry professionals and public sector players to better know the market.

One of the largest series A financing for an eHealth Southeast Asian company

The oversubscribed round lead by Unitus Impact is one of the largest Series A financing for a digital health firm in Southeast Asia.

Other investors who joined the financing round include:

• Global Innovation Fund (London);
• MDI Ventures (Indonesia);
• Endeavour Catalyst (US);

Existing investors, 500 Startups (United States), IMJ Investment Partners (Singapore) and Kickstart Ventures (Philippines), also participated.

MClinica: collecting pharmacy data on a single platform to better monitor market developments

Founded in 2012 in Singapore, mClinica now connects thousands of pharmacies on common platforms through a mobile application.

The three main « missions » of mClinica:

• connecting pharmacies on a common platform;
• providing quick and easy access to new data sources;
• developing programs from the collection of this data to improve patient affordability and health outcomes.

The first task of the application is to track what medicines are being prescribed, dispensed and bought in small pharmacies, whose activities are often unknown by other market players because there are usually isolated and unconnected.

An application reserved for industry professionals and public players

• The mClinica’s app is for pharmacy stores.

  The device provides them:

  • a loyalty program for their customers, enabling them to offer discounts (a big help in developing countries, where the poor have usually limited access to medicines), and so encourage them to share their data and to be enrolled into a program that helps them better understand their health conditions and reminds them to refill when they are running low on supply;
  • news from the industry;
  • other tools to better manage their business.

• There is no consumer application.

Customers simply provide their mobile phone number to the pharmacist to register and again at the counter for future purchases in order to claim loyalty points and discounts. Information about their purchases is collected by the pharmacy and send to the mClinica’s platform to get reimbursement by the drug companies.

All data are « desensitized » to protect consumer privacy, the Singapore firm said.

Once analyzed, the collected data is used to produce reports that can be sold to pharmaceutical companies, to devise programs to improve patients’ health while boosting their sales, but also to public sector players who want to follow the sector development in Southeast Asia.

Making millions of health data accessible for a more transparent market

« Trillions of dollars are spent by the public and private healthcare sectors and often there is no data to guide the right programming and policy decisions, said Farouk Meralli, founder and CEO of the Singapore startup. At mClinica, we are connecting once-fragmented pharmacies on a common platform providing a unified set of global health data that has never been available before. Our goal is to rapidly transform the availability and quality of global health data in a matter of months not decades. »

Mr Meralli explains that the ASEAN region currently has no access to most of the health data available in the area because the market is dominated by small ‘mom and pop’ style stores (97% of all pharmacies in Indonesia, according to M . Meralli – source: TechCrunch):

• Pharmaceutical companies want to know more about their business, supply chains, etc., in order to make more appropriate business decisions.
• Governments and NGOs would like to access more relevant data in real time to be able to shape policy.
• For consumers, this lack visibility affects the price of medicine, which are high and growing at a faster rate relative to their income. By sharing their data, the market would become more transparent and thus, pharmacies would be encouraged to offer more competitive prices.

MClinica plans to expand rapidly in Southeast Asia and perhaps internationally

The specific number of users of mClinica service has not been revealed by the company. Farouk Meralli simply said that his form has a potential reach of 70 million patients through the more than 5,000 pharmacies it works with.

The startup plans to use its new funds to increase its reach by using offline communication methods (advertising on the street sales for example) associated with digital means, especially on social networks, to reach more pharmacies.

Imminent launch in Malaysia and Thailand

In addition to its headquarters in Singapore, the mClinica service is currently present in three major Southeast Asia markets: the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. The company would like to expand to cover Malaysia and Thailand before the end of 2017. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are also on the list of countries where the startup intends to set up.

Initially, mClinica was designed for massive markets, such as India and Brazil, but the Philippines was actually selected for a first pilot following a request from a prospective customer. Since then, the company has focused on Southeast Asia but it also considering an expansion of its activities in other parts of the world in the future.

A « systems changing » company

Since raising its seed round in 2014, the mobile application has continued to increase its network of pharmacies. The company has won international pitching competitions and has acquired in 2015 an equity stake in Medix, a Philippines healthcare and SaaS company.

Unitus Impact managing partner Partner Beau Seil describe mClinica as a « system changing » company able to change the healthcareindustry in developing countries.