• Egypt-based healthtech Chefaa has raised an undisclosed venture round from Newtown Partners and Global Brain as well as GMS Capital Partners. 
• Founded in 2017 by Rasha Rady and Doaa Aref, the female-led healthtech is an e-pharmacy platform that provides an end-to-end healthcare experience.
• The new round will allow Chefaa to further expand its network, support the release of its new product, launch in new markets and digitise management for chronic patients’ quality of life.

Press release:

Chefaa, Egypt’s patient-centred pharmacy benefits platform, has announced raising a venture round from Newtown Partners and Global Brain as well as GMS Capital Partners. 

The undisclosed round is part of Chefaa’s journey to further expand its network, support the release of its Chefaa Prime product, a complete medical insurance alternative designed for emerging markets and launch officially in new markets.

Moreover, this venture round will fund Chefaa efforts to digitise chronic illness management through a comprehensive approach to achieve measurable improvement in chronic patients' quality of life. 

This is also the three VCs' first venture into the Egyptian market. Newtown Partners, operating out of South Africa is an early-stage venture fund run by entrepreneurs with investment in major names such as Swyft, Reach Labs and Blockfolio.

Global Brain operates out of Japan with a massive portfolio of 24 IPOs and 54 Merge & Acquisitions in industries such as Commerce, Gaming, Fintech and IoT among many more. 

On the venture round, Llew Claasen, Managing Partner at Newtown Partners comments

“We have found Chefaa to be compelling for its proven ability to scale across geographies, impressive traction and growth across MENA, a strong female-led team with extensive healthcare and pharmaceutical expertise, a large, engaged base of customers, as well as strong alignment with our pharmaceutical e-commerce thesis and their ability to digitize healthcare interfaces.”

Chefaa is one of the leading pharmaceutical and wellness platforms in Mena with a focus on offering compliant, ethical and patient-centric services to users through several services including Chefaa’s main platform and App and other bespoke AI-driven solutions such as Chefaa Prime, a specially designed insurance alternative, a subscription-based service offering a seamless array of support to patients and medical customers from all walks of life and income levels. 

Mr Yasuhiko Yurimoto, founder, CEO and General Partner at Global Brain comments on the venture round “ There is usually a challenge to meet patient needs particularly when it comes to medicine. We believe that Chefaa's approach of growth, which is an opportunity to enhance medical literacy through freemium service and employee benefits, is the right way and contributes to one of the severe national health problems; a shortage of providing optimum care for chronic patients.”

Doaa Aref, CEO and Founder of Chefaa says “From the start, we focused on empowering Chefaa’s ability to measure the impact of every step it takes with real data, not just for funding but for execution and scaling as well.” 

“I believe this venture round is pivotal not because it will only help us scale our validated business models, but because it will also help us capitalize on untapped market opportunities.”

“We are confident Chefaa will dominate over a much larger market share in the next two years.”