Venture Spotlight: DoctorsLive

The Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Challenge’s first cohort is visiting Toronto this summer, where they are continuing their implementation phase through activities targeting business development, expanding entrepreneurial networks and facilitating exposure to potential investors. 

The HENT Communications team caught up with the ventures to learn more about the origins of their companies, what they’ve learned to date, and what is coming up next...

DoctorsLive  - KENYA

Pauline Gethi was inspired to start DoctorsLive with the simple mindset that change is possible. Gethi had previously tried to seek support from a mental health professional, only to find that it would take her over one year to finally receive quality care. For Gethi, and the many others facing this barrier to care, this meant being left to face her mental health challenges alone. From this experience, Gethi recognized a gap in quality mental health care in Africa, and DoctorsLive was created to be the source of change that the system desperately needs. 
 
Some of the challenges that DoctorsLive are seeking to solve include long wait times to book therapy sessions, inaccessibility for many patients, and a limited number of mental health practitioners. Awareness of mental health disorders is also lacking in the region which has led to stigma and discrimination, creating additional barriers to accessing mental health care.

DoctorsLive aims to combat these problems through personalized and on-demand digital mental health care that matches individuals to a care plan that is tailored to their unique needs. DoctorsLive offers a range of care services, including mental health assessments, video therapy sessions, live coaching, a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) chatbot and self-care resources. Through these varied models of care, clients of DoctorsLive benefit from diversity, quality and affordability through a single point-of-access. 

What is the accomplishment to date that your team is most proud of?   

As a team, DoctorsLive is proud to launch their MVP, to continue learning from their customers, and integrate improvements into the app as needed. From March 2022 to December 2022, the app hosted an estimated 165 therapy sessions. Additionally, the venture is proud to be a part of the African Impact Initiative 2022 Incubation program.  

If you could give advice to another founder getting started, what would that be?   

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Don’t let other people validate your company if you are truly passionate about your idea and you know it is going to change people’s lives.” 

In the coming year, DoctorsLive is looking to increase their sales growth rate from 10% to 30% and expand their client base to the African diaspora. As they continue to grow, DoctorsLive plans to launch their B2B platform to help businesses improve the well-being of their employees, as well as create a healthy work environment that can better their employees’ productivity. While working towards this goal, the venture is continuously upgrading the platform to best serve their users and deliver the highest quality of care possible. 

You can learn more about DoctorsLive by visiting their website.  

Venture Spotlight: Food Bundles

The Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Challenge’s first cohort is visiting Toronto this summer, where they are continuing their implementation phase through activities targeting business development, expanding entrepreneurial networks and facilitating exposure to potential investors. 

In the meantime, the HENT Communications team caught up with the ventures from the first HENT Challenge cohort to learn more about the origins of their companies, what they’ve learned to date, and what is coming up next... 

Food Bundles - RWANDA

Having grown up in rural areas, Dioscore Shakima and his co-founder were well aware of the obstacles small farmers faced in accessing customers. This inspired them to create Food Bundles, an app that enables farmers to increase their earnings and reduce post-harvest losses. Their solution allows consumers in bigger cities to budget for their food, and small farmers to have the ability to limit food price inflation by eliminating middlemen grocery stores. Food Bundles collects produce directly from small farmers and their app provides consumers the opportunity to get fresh food delivered right to their doorstep.

Acknowledging the researched connection between Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and malnutrition, poor distribution of nutritious food and poor education on health nutrition, Food Bundles is also using their platform to fight increasing NCDs in cities. Through Food Bundles, household consumers in cities can select pre-made bundles of food which are curated to maximize nutrition. Customers can also opt to receive recommendations based on their health status, ensuring they have access to the food best positioned to improve their health. 

What is the accomplishment to date that your team is most proud of?   

Finding a market product with a working business model that was ready to scale up was a great achievement. We have a mobile application for both consumers and aggregators available on both iOS and Android which allows us to serve all our users. To date, we have built a network of 10,000 smallholder farmer suppliers and seen more than 1500 transactions with customers in Kigali. We are also happy to expand our operations in the Zambia market! 

If you could give advice to another founder getting started, what would that be? 

Be ready to exercise patience, building a product is not the problem but finding a product market fit to have a profitable and scalable business takes much time than expected, and raising needed capital is harder than what you can possibly imagine. Have resilience! 

Looking forward, Food Bundles is aiming to raise the necessary financial resources to stabilize their technology, upgrade their logistics, and scale up to three markets in the next year and a half. In their upcoming quarter, this looks like growing their B2B customers base, with a goal of obtaining daily fresh food orders of $100+ to 100 small-to-medium restaurants.  

You can learn more about Food Bundles by visiting their website.