Investment firm HAVA'IC has partnered with Vula Mobile and has helped the professional medical network mobile app to raise seed funding of R1 million.
Vula Mobile is the brainchild of Dr William Mapham, who conceived the idea for the app while working at the Vula Emehlo Eye Clinic, in Swaziland, in 2014. The mobile app connects health workers in remote and under-served areas to medical and surgical specialists in urban centres.
The seed funding, according to HAVA'IC, will be used to expand and enhance the Vula mobile platform, and will be used as working capital for management salaries, including adding a new sales role to bring in advertising and partnership revenue.
One of its missions is to overcome the geographic concentration of specialists and increase the quality of healthcare available in rural and underserved communities, notes the app.
Dr William Mapham, founder of Vula Mobile, says through the partnership, the start-up will be able to focus on growth within the health sector.
"As a start-up we didn't have the skills to raise capital on our own. The HAVA'IC team's combined experience in finance, legal and equity sales made the innovative seed round possible. Vula product manager Debr'e Barrett has ensured that technical development facilitated the startup's growth, while the rapid increase in the number of users has enabled us to offer attractive partnerships to companies in the medical industry.
"I am especially grateful for HAVA'IC partner, Rob Heath's financial modelling and HAVA'IC executive director, Grant Rock's legal advice. Given the legal complexities in the health sector it is great that Rock has agreed to join Vula's board as a non-executive," explains Mapham.
Funds from the capital raise, explained Mapham, have also enabled the Vula team to work full time.
HAVA'IC is an investment and advisory firm that assists early-stage, high-growth African businesses with corporate advisory and capital raising services to help them emerge and scale.
After four months of advisory work Vula and HAVA'IC ran an innovative seed round. The opportunity was made available to existing Vula Mobile partners, users, stakeholders and HAVA'IC partners to invest in a minimum of R5 000 each. This made it affordable for many health workers to invest in Vula Mobile.
"HAVA'IC manages the investment into Vula on behalf of the 70 plus health professionals that invested their money. The HAVAIC partners have also invested their own funds. We have assumed a non-exec directorship on the Vula board. In this role we will support the management team with strategic matters relating to finance, business strategy, legal and commercial issues," explains Roock.
The number of health workers registered on Vula have more than doubled from 1 775 at the beginning of January 2017, to more than 3 600 a year later, according to the company.
Vula has been recognised locally, winning MTN's Most Innovative App Award, and internationally as a top 20 finalist in Amazon's City on a Cloud Awards.
Dr Lungi Nyathi, currently the non-executive chair of Vula, and an executive director at Medscheme, explains: "Government health departments globally face budget constraints, and we feel it more strongly here in Sub-Saharan African."
Last year software and services company DVT collaborated with Vula in an effort to help the app provide quality medical care to rural and remote patients, through a range of software testing and test automation services.
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