Company profile

PBR Life Sciences powers Africa’s life-sciences ecosystem through a next-generation healthcare intelligence platform built on high-quality, targeted data and advanced analytics. Its integrated data hub combines anonymised patient journeys, medicine sales, and commercial and financial intelligence to deliver granular visibility across the healthcare value chain. By enabling faster drug development, optimised supply networks, smarter commercialisation strategies, and evidence-based health policy, PBR is unlocking the scale and precision needed for medical advancement across Africa.

Why we invested

In 2016, in a library in Ilupeju, Lagos, a pharmaceutical executive sat cleaning data by hand. Row by row, in a spreadsheet, roughly a million rows of it, for three months, because the information and data infrastructure he needed to understand how medicine actually moved through Africa did not exist in any usable form. He had spent his career inside the giants of global pharma, and he knew the number that should have haunted the whole industry: across Africa, more than $10 billion is lost every year to drugs that expire on shelves or are never made in the first place, because no one can see what patients actually need. One company alone once destroyed $700,000 of expired medicine, then had to pay the regulator for the privilege of destroying it. The waste was not a mystery. It was a measurement problem. And Ayodeji Alaran was sitting in a library, measuring it one row at a time.

You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and across most of Africa healthcare has been the great unmeasured variable: the supply chains, the disease burden, the patient outcomes, all thin, inconsistent, or simply absent. We backed PBR because Ayodeji left Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca and IQVIA after eighteen years, carrying something no outside founder could carry – the exact coordinates of where the system breaks. PBR aggregates and analyses anonymised data from over a thousand pharmacies, and the engine his team trained now reads more than 70 million drug sales across 10,000 brands and 23,000 diseases, turning ten months of manual cleaning into thirty minutes. Sanofi, Roche, the IFC and others now see, for the first time, what they were previously guessing at.

But the deepest reason we backed PBR is the one that outlasts any single market. The global pharmaceutical industry is now training its AI, the models that will discover and target the medicines of the future, on the world's health data. Africa is largely missing from that data. That means the continent projected to hold, with Asia, eight of every ten people alive by the end of this century is at risk of being written out of the medicine being built for that future, simply because no one recorded its patients. PBR exists to build the digital infrastructure to put them back in. 

We backed PBR because the continent's healthcare future depends on the quality of its data, and because a man who once cleaned a million rows by hand to prove the point is exactly the kind of founder who will see it through.