Yodawy

Subsidy : August 2024

BIO has granted USD 22 K of technical assistance to Yodawy, a healthcare software platform in Egypt

Amount

$ 22,154.00

Type of investment

Subsidy

Beneficiary locations

Africa: Egypt

Investment field

Enterprises

Activity

Q86.2 Medical and dental practice activities

Organisation

Yodawy

Website

https://www.yodawy.com/

Domicile

Egypt

Yodawy is a modern-day healthcare platform building software to make patients’ access to medication easy and affordable.

Since its inception in 2018, Yodawy leveraged technology to integrate healthcare players, manage a vast network of pharmacies, improve complex supply chain ops, and utilize data to overcome medication stock availability challenges. Concretely, the health-tech platform operates a:

B2B pharmacy management and delivery business that caters to insurance providers, self insured corporates and syndicates
B2C e-pharmacy targeting both insured and out of pocket chronic and acute patients (150.000 patients a month)
Micro-insurance prescription-focused service to uninsured chronic patients

Yodawy offers nationwide direct-to-consumer tech-powered fulfilment via (1) Yodawy dispensary for the majority of chronic orders and (2) 3000 marketplace pharmacies for all acute orders.

BIO is indirectly invested in Yodawy Inc. through the Ezdehar Mid-Cap Fund II which provided a 10 M USD equity investment to the company.

BIO's impact

Yodawy is using their current “middle mile” fleet of 7 petrol and diesel powered vans to distribute the prescription products to intermediary warehouses in the vicinity of Cairo (80% of their whole deliveries).

From there, they use third party drivers for the last mile delivery to their customers. They also use their current fleet to distribute their products to intermediary hubs outside of Cairo, within the whole country (20%). Often, they need to extend the middle mile fleet with additional petrol cars on peak days in the month.

Thus, they are looking to increase the size of the fleet to avoid depending on third party drivers to connect their intermediary warehouses in the country, and preferably using electrical vehicles to cover the vicinity of Cairo.

However, as Egypt is a rather nascent market for electrical vehicles, the penetration is still low and does not exceed 1-2% of the market. In addition, the majority of this penetration is in the private/personal sector, with the commercial or logistics sector still almost solely reliant on traditional internal combustion vehicles. There is no (re)seller of electrical trucks, vans, minivans or other material transportation vehicles in Egypt.

Technical assistance

BIO's technical assistance is aimed at augmenting the Yodawy middle mile vehicle fleet with five electric vehicles, which will cover more than 80% of all deliveries.

Partner with local supplier to retro-fit combustion engine vehicles with electric motors
Goal is to reduce cost of middle mile deliveries while also reducing carbon footprint
Demonstrate that EVs for commercial purpose in Egypt is a profitable investment
Support the deployment of an innovative solution

Expected impact

Reduction of middle mile delivery cost by over 25%
Improvement of carbon footprint by replacing petrol vehicles with electric vehicles through a very innovative low-cost solution
Support of local SME ecosystem by working with Egyptian vendor
Pave the way to additional investments in clean energy use and production (PV, additional EVs,...)
Contribute to the improvement of air quality in Cairo, which is one of the worst worldwide.