Medikea, a Tanzanian healthtech startup, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding to expand a healthcare network that combines virtual consultations with physical clinics, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, and specialist care.

The pre-seed round — the earliest formal stage of startup fundraising — was backed by Baobab Network, Catalyst Fund, develoPPP Ventures, Madica, Impacc, Hustle Fund, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, Madiro, the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, and an unnamed angel investor.

The raise comes as healthtech startups across Africa continue to navigate a difficult funding environment. Healthtech companies raised just $18 million in the first half of 2026, or 1.3% of the $1.44 billion secured by African startups overall during that period.

Medikea says it has already used part of the $1.2 million to expand its clinic network, opening two new facilities in Arusha and Morogoro and bringing its total to four clinics across Tanzania. The company said the remaining capital will fund its next phase of expansion, including new clinics, key hires, technology and product development, operations, sales, marketing, and growth.

"Building this way is harder, and we chose it deliberately," Dr Elvis Silayo, Medikea's co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "If you layer technology on top of a broken system, you are digitising inefficiency. You inherit someone else's costs and someone else's quality problems, and you can't scale past them. We rebuilt the parts we depend on, so that we can deliver a better experience at a lower price and still hold a fair margin."

Founded in 2022 by Silayo and a team of doctors and software engineers, Medikea began with the idea that technology could make healthcare easier to access. The team eventually realised the problem went beyond digital access, as patients had to move between different facilities depending on their situation. Private healthcare offered an alternative, but was too expensive for many people paying out of pocket. That realisation led Medikea to build what it describes as a technology-enabled healthcare delivery system.

How Medikea Works

In its current form, a patient can use the Medikea app to consult a doctor virtually, visit one of the company's clinics when an examination is needed, get tests at its diagnostic lab, fill a prescription at its pharmacy, and return to virtual care for follow-up. The company's electronic medical records connect these interactions and allow a patient's history to follow them across touchpoints. Medikea said it also operates specialist outpatient services covering paediatrics, women's health, dermatology, fertility, and chronic disease care.

"Healthcare is one large market made up of services that all depend on each other. If you build only one part, you depend on partners for the rest, and you lose control over what matters most to patients: trust, reliability, speed and price," Silayo told TechCabal in an email response. "There is a lot of talk about healthcare being broken. Digitising a broken system just brings all its problems to the cloud. What needs fixing first is how care is delivered. Then technology makes it efficient and scalable."

Medikea's business model is more capital-intensive than that of typical digital health platforms, as it involves operating the clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies alongside its digital service. company believes owning these parts of the healthcare journey can also make the business more profitable as it scales.

"The two channels have different costs, and combining them lets us use each where it makes the most sense," Silayo said. "The clinic is where trust is built and where examinations, tests, and procedures happen. Virtual care makes follow-up easier and less costly to deliver, and lets each clinic serve patients well beyond its walls. Together, they let us keep care continuous and manage costs across the whole patient journey."

The vertically integrated healthcare model — one operator owning the clinics, laboratories, and pharmacies a patient moves between, rather than relying on partners for each step — puts Medikea in competition with Tanzanian digital-health players including TanzMED, AfyaCall, and LyfPlus, as well as traditional clinics. Elsewhere on the continent, Uganda's Rocket Health and Kenya-based Zuri Health, which uses partnerships and mobile infrastructure to extend its reach, employ a similar approach to healthcare delivery. Medikea says owning the infrastructure gives it greater control over quality, pricing, clinical workflows, and the patient experience.

Medikea earns revenue through fee-for-service payments for consultations, specialist services, diagnostics, and pharmacy products. It also offers subscription programmes for patients who require ongoing care, beginning with chronic disease management.

The company said it has served more than 50,000 patients since launching and currently has a clinical team of more than 40 people. It aims to serve more than 100,000 patients over the next 12 months and to grow from four clinics to 10 across Tanzania by the end of 2027, before expanding into other markets in the region.

"Our biggest lesson is that good doctors and a convenient app are not enough on their own. The whole journey has to work together," Silayo said. "We are not simply opening more clinics. We are replicating a model in which technology, clinical teams and facilities work together around the patient."

Medikea plans to expand by opening and operating its own clinics, although it is also open to acquiring existing facilities. For now, the company is focused on proving that its model can scale sustainably in Tanzania before entering other markets in the region. The pace of new clinic openings, whether acquisitions supplement organic expansion, and how far its subscription programmes stretch beyond chronic disease management will be the near-term markers of whether the model is scaling as designed.

"Our goal is not to enter as many countries as quickly as possible," Silayo said. "It is to build a model that works in Tanzania, then replicate it selectively where it can make a real difference and build a sustainable business."