Rabat – Pan-African Initiative Investing in Innovation (i3) has selected three Moroccan health tech startups, Sobrus, Deepecho, and Medevice Technological Diagnosis, for its first cohort.
The Moroccan startups are part of a cohort of 30 African startups with high growth potential and the ability to address the issues prevalent in the African health care system.
On Tuesday, the i3 program announced the cohort members selected from a pool of 450 applications from 31 African countries. The selected 30 will benefit from a $50,000 grant, investment readiness support, and access to a network of regional and global partners.
By financing and guiding early-stage African startups, i3 seeks to improve health indicators across the continent, advance female entrepreneurship, and consolidate the startup ecosystems in francophone Africa.
The program notably secured a $7 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support its activities envisioned by Casablanca-based Southbridge A&I, Vancouver’s Salient, and Abuja’s SCIDAR.
The three institutions have supervised the cohort selection process delegated to four African incubators including Impact Lab in Casablanca, Villgro Africa in Nairobi, Co-Creation Hub in Lagos, and Startupbootcamp in Cape Town.
The celebrated Moroccan startups
This year, i3 selected Sobrus, Deepecho, and Medevice Technological Diagnosis. The three have well-established health tech solutions in Morocco and beyond with a solid customer base.
Sobrus, for instance, offers four cloud-based solutions that connect pharmacies to wholesalers and patients to doctors and laboratories. According to their website, each month 627,000 patients and 32,000 health professionals submit over 40 million requests through the platform to benefit from the e-services. The startup currently operates in 14 countries in Africa and Europe.
Deepecho, for its part, has developed an AI technology for prenatal ultrasound imaging and diagnosis to detect prenatal complications and reduce infant and maternal mortality rates. By using AI technology, the Moroccan startup seeks to assist and simplify ultrasounds for minimally trained clinical professionals in nontraditional health care settings.
“We believe we can improve the way fetal US [ultrasound] diagnosis is performed to improve its efficiency, accuracy and impact,” said Deepecho’s Chief Medical Officer Saad Slimani.
As for Medevice Technological Diagnosis, the startup was developed by the Moroccan Foundation for Advanced Science, Innovation, and Research (MAScIR), to enhance diagnostic services in the country.
The Moroccan startup has so far developed three medical devices including MMP for monitoring patients’ vital signs, Spectro for COVID-19 diagnosis, and Lab on Card for the interpretation of Tuberculosis (TB) test results. The three devices aim to provide more accurate test results.
Given the deterioration of health care conditions in Morocco and Africa, health tech solutions appear to be instrumental in addressing local issues and making health services better and more accessible.
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