Helium Health acquires Meddy, Qatar's doctor booking platform

Helium Health has announced its acquisition of Meddy in an undisclosed deal. Helium Health is a Lagos-based healthcare technology provider and Meddy, a UAE-based doctor booking platform.

Founded in 2016 by Adegoke Olubisi, Dimeji Sofowora and Tito Ovia, Helium Health's core electronic medical records (EMR) and hospital management solutions is being used by over 5,000 medical professionals in West Africa to treat over 150,000 patients monthly.

Following its $10 million in Series A funding raised in 2020, the company built HeliumPay — a billing and payments solution; HeliumCredit — a collateral-free loan product, and HeliumDoc — a patient-provider and revenue cycle management and data analytics services platform. Meddy will be merged with Helium Doc.

Arguably, its one of the first acquisition deal between Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). With this acquisition, Meddy's CEO Haris Aghadi and COO Abed Alkarim Khattab will join the Helium Health leadership to enable the execution of its expansion into the Gulf region — Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.

Reacting to the acquisition, Haris Aghadi, Chief Executive Officer of Meddy Inc. said "joining Helium is a perfect next chapter for Meddy as it enhances our mission to help patients make informed health decisions. Our goal has always been to provide technology to all the stakeholders across the value chain and joining forces [with helium health] gets us there faster."

“There is a strong synergy between our products, teams and markets. Combining Meddy’s marketing solutions with Helium’s clinical solutions will add tremendous value to our customers and transform healthcare in the Middle East and Africa.” - Haris Aghadi

Per TechCrunch, though Helium Health has a wide range of B2B offerings, it lacks in other areas especially in telemedicine and appointment bookings, which are more consumer-facing products. The company could have built out these services but acquiring Meddy presented a better option due its expansion play.

Aside from managing bookings and patient reviews, Meddy offers marketing solutions for hospitals to improve their online presence and attract new patients.

According to Adegoke Olubisi, "you don’t have a lot of people who can provide a suite like ours in the GCC. If they do, they’re doing it at a price point that’s so high that they’ve already priced out the market in that sense"

"But we can provide a full suite where you can do your appointments booking, marketing solution, EMR, hospital management information system, and have everything in a one-stop shop. It saves you a lot of stress in the process from trying to consolidate many different systems", he said.

Read how Helium Health is reducing medical errors and wait time at Nigerian hospitals

Olubisi told TechCrunch that "beyond the actual product and market opportunity, what made this possible was really the composition of the team, how well they executed the fact that they share a DNA and culture that’s very similar to ours."

These similarities hasten the deal between Helium Health and Meddy to be closed in less than four months. Currently, Helium serves Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, Kenya and Uganda — with more than 500 healthcare facilities

Featured Image:
Adegoke Olubisi (CEO), Tito Ovia (Head, Public Growth Sector), Dimeji Sofowora (CFO), eddy's CEO Haris Aghadi and COO Abed Alkarim Khattab