Startups

Ivorian healthtech startup Susu has $1M to scale its family-centric insurance product across Africa

Comment

Image Credits: SUSU

More Africans now suffer from chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension than ever before. A growing population and lifestyle changes, especially around urbanization and food habits, are significant factors that contribute to this sharp rise.

This isn’t an issue in developed markets, as healthcare systems change with the times to adequately provide healthcare when necessary. But in Africa, that’s not the case, as most people do not have access to quality healthcare due to the ill-equipped nature of hospitals and lack of insurance. 

Healthtech startups across Africa, such as Ivory Coast- and French-based Susu are stepping up to fill this need. And in a bid to continue providing affordable and accessible healthcare for its customers in Ivory Coast, Senegal and Cameroon, the Ivorian startup is being backed with $1 million in pre-seed funding.

The equity raise saw participation mainly from angel investors, as the company also raised $1.2 million in debt and grant financing from BPI France, the French government’s public investment bank.

Bola Bardet founded the company with Laurent Leconte (CTO) and Sandrine Egron (COO) after losing her father to complications from a chronic health condition due to poor management.

“My father died in 2017 after he had a heart issue in Benin and could not be saved. The health issue was a complication from his hypertension that was poorly managed,” Bardet told TechCrunch over a call. “At that moment, I was finishing my MBA at HEC Paris and the goal I set for myself was to try to prevent that happening to other people, maybe that will be something good that I can do in my life.” So that’s how the story started.”

Having worked in a luxury firm, as an investment banker at JP Morgan and her own consulting firm, Bardet decided to start Susu in 2019.

Susu founders
Susu founders

Susu offers care packages or bundles to patients suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and pregnant women who require careful management to ensure their conditions are monitored and get the preventative advice to live the best way with their conditions.

According to a few reports, the medical insurance penetration rate is less than 3% in Africa. While insurtech incumbents and upstarts such as CarePay and Reliance Health try to make insurance readily available for the rest of the market via partnerships with companies or by enabling weekly to monthly subscription charges, users are still required most times to pay out of pocket.

That’s where Susu tends to be different. In addition to allowing patients to finance their bills, Susu proposes a collective financing solution where family members living locally or in the diaspora can also help patients finance their monthly subscription fees via care bundles. Care bundles are basically medical calendars composed of doctor consultations, nurse visits, medical advice sent by SMS and a combination of other medical activities for patients.

“A survey we carried out proved that family members are used to helping and supporting sick family relatives, and they are willing to do so. So it’s something that is already done today, let’s say informally in our countries,” said the chief executive on the company’s strategy to allow family members of patients to pay for the healthcare of their loved ones. “So these are the possibilities that are offered and we are today contemplating the possibility of having NGOs or government-funded programs contribute to the bundles, but it’s long term.”

With this model, Susu faces fresh competition from companies like Techstars-backed Fleri. The U.S.-based company allows immigrants to send money directly to services their families need back home. However, Susu’s approach is pretty unique, Bardet says. According to her, the company targets solely insurance, not a bunch of services, and provides a financial escape for those who can’t afford it.

The product seems to have resonated well with its 5,000-strong customer base, which grew 5x last year. Revenue also increased more than 400% in 2021, the company said.

“I have been following Susu since the beginning of the project. And I see its huge potential, focused on building a solution to provide access to affordable healthcare in Africa through technology,” said Christopher Neves, one of Susu’s angel investors who has several years of experience working with multinational insurance companies.

Susu intends to grow its team and introduce new features with its recent funding. Bardet also said the company would launch its services across six more countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria and Ghana.

More TechCrunch

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools