Company profile

Founded in 2021, Pharmacy Marts is a B2B digital marketplace connecting pharmacies with medical suppliers for the procurement of medicines, medical supplies, and cosmetics. Through its web and mobile platform, pharmacies can compare products and prices from multiple suppliers, streamlining procurement and improving supply chain efficiency. In addition to its marketplace, Pharmacy Marts offers embedded financing solutions, including a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) facility, enabling pharmacies to access working capital and manage inventory more effectively.

Why we invested

Egypt is the largest pharmaceutical market in Africa, worth around $5 billion, built on a population above 100 million and growing at double-digit rates. By every headline number, it is a market that has arrived. And yet step inside it and you find something startling: a $5 billion sector still run by phone calls and paper invoices. A pharmacist in Cairo spends roughly a third of every working day not serving patients but chasing stock, ringing around suppliers to check what exists, what it costs, and who can deliver, across a market splintered into 70,000 pharmacies and more than 2,500 suppliers with nothing connecting them. So they guess. They over-order and watch medicine expire, or under-order to protect cash and run out of the exact drug a patient needs. 

Pharmacy Marts closes this gap from end to end, which is what drew us in. It is not a marketplace bolted onto a problem; it’s the full stack. Pharmacists manage and forecast inventory on the platform, order from more than 200 suppliers through a single marketplace instead of a hundred phone calls, and reach financing on terms that match their purchasing cycles rather than a wholesaler’s rigid demands. 

What settled it for us was the team’s fit to exactly this problem. Building Pharmacy Marts means winning three hard things at once: the trust of pharmacists, the cooperation of suppliers, and the discipline of lending. Its four founders map onto that almost precisely, pairing operators who built Egypt’s fintech and payments companies, with a commercial leader out of the pharmaceutical industry itself. This perfect combination for this specific solution is so preciously rare that if anyone could build every layer required, it would be them.

We backed Pharmacy Marts because the opportunity is specific enough to be winnable and large enough to matter. A market this big, digitised by the team best built to digitise it, is not a bet on whether it works. It is a bet on how far it goes.