So she built a solution. In 2017, Adebakin launched Advantage Health Africa (AHA) to make accessing quality, affordable medication as seamless as ordering dinner. Through its flagship platform, MyMedicines, AHA delivers prescriptions across Nigeria<\/a>\u2014even to remote areas\u2014while supplying clinics and pharmacies through a growing B2B distribution network. Today, the company serves over 30 HMOs, moves thousands of orders monthly, and powers an increasingly digitised ecosystem through its proprietary inventory visibility platform, The Advantage.<\/p>\n The road to relevance was anything but linear. Failed products. Broken tech. Layoffs. A near-collapse of their pharmacy network. On today\u2019s edition of Day 1 to 1000, AHA\u2019s founder and CEO, Abimbola Adebakin, walks me through how she built a healthtech company out of frustration, scaled it through a pandemic, and learned when to pivot, when to let go, and when to keep the faith.<\/p>\n This is the story of Advantage Health Africa, as told to TechCabal.<\/p>\n Day 1-1000: From consulting gigs to a tech-enabled pharmacy network<\/p>\n Advantage Health Africa didn\u2019t start with a grand strategy. It started with shame.<\/p>\n A family friend needed a drug. I offered to help. I\u2019m a pharmacist\u2014how hard could it be? I went to a pharmacy. They didn\u2019t have it. I went to another. And another. I visited nine pharmacies across Lagos that day and still came up empty-handed. I was embarrassed. What kind of system was this? What kind of pharmacist was I if I couldn\u2019t find a basic drug?<\/p>\n That moment stayed with me. It opened my eyes to something we all quietly endure: a broken distribution system that forces sick people to wander from pharmacy to pharmacy, hoping to get lucky. I thought: we can\u2019t keep working around this. We have to fix it.<\/p>\n When I started Advantage Health Africa in 2017, we launched with services: consulting, training, anything to keep the lights on while we figured out the bigger thing. We built relationships. We worked with pharmacy associations and regulators. We mapped the territory.<\/p>\n Nine months later, on October 1st, we launched MyMedicines, a direct-to-consumer service that lets people order drugs and get them delivered. That first year, the traction was slow but steady. Then COVID hit.<\/p>\n Suddenly, what we were offering wasn\u2019t a convenience, it was essential. People couldn\u2019t leave their homes. Clinics wouldn\u2019t take non-critical patients. HMOs that previously ignored us came running. \u201cCan your pharmacies deliver?\u201d they asked. \u201cYes,\u201d we said, because we could.<\/p>\n Revenue jumped 10x. Word of mouth exploded. People abroad were ordering drugs for their parents in Bayelsa, Onitsha, places we could reach in 24 hours. CNN called. The world noticed. And we knew: we\u2019d hit product-market fit.<\/p>\n We pivoted, failed, restructured, and kept going<\/p>\n Before COVID, we\u2019d also tried building a pharmacy franchise called MyPharmacy. But the timing was off. The tech was shaky. COVID made everything harder. We raised some money for it, but within 12 months, we shut it down. Still, the name stuck. People began to refer to us as \u201cMyPharmacy\u201d even after it was gone. And we kept the spirit of the network alive, just not in the format we started with.<\/p>\n That was hard. Letting go of the vision\u2014and letting go of people. But we did it properly. We flew in our field staff, sat them down, and paid two months\u2019 salary. Helped them reposition. Some of them came back later when we were ready to rebuild.<\/p>\n We also tried wholesaling to pharmacies but quickly realised that wasn\u2019t scalable. The margins were brutal. The scale wasn\u2019t there. It was our board that pushed me to switch to selective distribution. They were right. That arm took off once we brought in a seasoned MD with experience in sales and marketing. I had to admit what I didn\u2019t know and hire someone for it. Our branded generics\u2014GT Plus, Real C Brazil, and others\u2014are now thriving in the market.<\/p>\n I come from an organisational development background. Even in chaos, I knew we needed structure: operating models, culture, systems. We got ISO-certified early on. We let people go when we had to, humanely, and hired back some of them later.<\/p>\n Get the best African tech newsletters in your inbox<\/p>\n Day 1000-Present day<\/p>\n We failed twice at building our core tech, then finally cracked it. We tried to build the tech backend\u2014what we now call The Advantage\u2014three times.<\/p>\n In 2018, we partnered with a team from Cape Verde who promised to help after we were selected among Africa\u2019s top 50 startups. It didn\u2019t work. In 2021, we tried again: it was another flop. Finally, we built internal capabilities, paired them with an external developer, and launched a working system in late 2023. Now it powers real-time inventory visibility across pharmacies. It\u2019s the infrastructure we always needed, and we own it.<\/p>\n Today, AHA runs two interlinked businesses:<\/p>\n 1. Direct to consumer through MyMedicines, with services like subscriptions, \u201cbuy now, pay later,\u201d and doorstep delivery.<\/p>\n 2. Business-to-business distribution, supplying select, in-demand drugs to pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals nationwide.<\/p>\n They feed into each other. A prescription generated by an eldercare startup? We fulfill it. A woman in Lagos placing an urgent nighttime order for her visiting brother? We\u2019ve got it covered. One of my favorite memories is delivering meds at 11 pm to a hotel in Ikeja. The customer was stunned that it was even possible in Nigeria.<\/p>\n What I wish I knew earlier and what\u2019s next<\/p>\n I wish we had secured seed funding earlier. It would\u2019ve saved us years of technical debt. But we made do. In 2019\u20132020, we raised about \u20a6300 million (~$1M at the time) in naira from angel investors. Since then, we\u2019ve mostly run on cash flow and strategic debt.<\/p>\n There were hard times. There were nights I took on consulting jobs just to cover payroll. One of my staff was working full-time while doing construction gigs to survive. Today, he\u2019s a manager, winning awards, and flying abroad. That grit and belief in the mission got us through.<\/p>\n One of my most euphoric moments in this business was in 2021, when Bayer Foundation selected us for their Women Empowerment Program. It was the pat on the back we desperately needed. After that came Google, the Nigerian Healthcare Excellence Award, and others. We started to believe again.<\/p>\n Honestly, I wanted to quit many times. I got offers to lead global foundations, even drone delivery startups expanding into West Africa. Since I started AHA, I haven\u2019t earned the kind of salary I earned during my Accenture career.\u00a0 And these companies were offering tempting salaries and steady jobs. But I kept thinking of the scripture that says, \u201cIf you\u2019re faithful in another man\u2019s business, God will give you your own.\u201d That promise anchored me.<\/p>\n We\u2019re looking to integrate our services more tightly: create clearer synergies between the B2B and DTC arms. And we\u2019re open to joining a larger ecosystem,a healthtech group where our infrastructure becomes the backbone.<\/p>\n What we\u2019re building is bigger than logistics. Bigger than tech. We\u2019re proving that in Africa, quality health access can reach the last mile and the last metre.<\/p>\n Mark your calendars! Moonshot by TechCabal is back in Lagos on October 15\u201316! Join Africa\u2019s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off\u2014don\u2019t snooze! moonshot.techcabal.com<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Moonshot-Announcement-Flyers1920-x-1080-1-1024x576.jpg\")
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