Nigerian healthtech, Lifestores Healthcare, an e-pharmacy platform that wants to democratise access to primary healthcare by aggregating and digitising pharmacies, is among the inaugural batch of alumni from Japan’s NINJA startup accelerator programme.
Launched in 2017, Lifestores is rapidly building a network of affiliated pharmacies who can benefit from its proprietary PharmIQ pharmacy management platform to procure inventory, access loans and offer e-commerce services to their patients.
The company started as a retail pharmacy chain, and continues to manage a small network of pharmacies today – but sees its broader mission as using technology to supercharge the fragmented pharma retail space.
“Pharmacies are the most visited space in primary healthcare; we cannot truly democratise access to health without backing them. Our experience running pharmacies gives us deep empathy on how best to support the frontline”, says Bryan Mezue, co-founder & CEO of Lifestores.
The NINJA (Next Innovation with Japan) startup programme, organised by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in partnership with Ventures Platform Foundation, offers 8 selected African startups a business grant as well as 6 months of hands-on business development support, mentoring & coaching.
Lifestores was one of the Nigerian companies selected for the 2021 batch, and pitched their business plan to an audience of thousands of Japanese business leaders and investors in March 2021.
“The NINJA programme really helped our traction. In the midst of the uncertainty of a pandemic, we grew our network of affiliated pharmacies 4 times in the first half of 2021, and are now supporting 200 dispensaries in Nigeria. We’re now expanding to cities outside Lagos and also exploring international markets”, says Mezue.
Lifestores has raised a couple of funding rounds, including a public Seed raise last year and a post-Seed extension earlier this year, and is currently concluding its Series A.
“COVID-19 has shown us all the criticality of the health sector. By building the core infrastructure of the sector, we want to help healthcare practitioners be at their best. With thousands of pharmacies and over 100,000 chemists in Nigeria alone, our work is just beginning.”
