Healthcare marketplace Vamstar secures $1.7m in seed funding

4 Feb 2021

Image: © Have a nice day/Stock.adobe.com

UK start-up Vamstar has created an AI-powered B2B healthcare marketplace, connecting suppliers with buyers in an era of unprecedented demand.

The pandemic has put unprecedented stress on healthcare supply chains. Vamstar, a London-based start-up, has developed an AI-powered B2B healthcare marketplace to help ease the strain. The company announced today (4 February) that it has secured $1.7m in a seed funding round led by European VC firm Btov, with contributions from Antler and Begin Capital.

Vamstar said it will use the funding to build supplier and buyer-related use cases to accelerate its growth. It will also expand its teams in the UK, Germany, India and the US, with plans to hire across data analysis, product development and sales and marketing by the end of the year.

The SaaS healthcare marketplace connects pharmaceutical, medical device and digital technology suppliers with public and private buyers, including hospitals and health insurance companies. It provides real-time profiling of suppliers and buyers and makes recommendations for contracts, tenders and direct purchases. The aim is to improve market access and save time and money for both sides of the supply chain.

The start-up was founded in early 2020 by CEO Praful Mehta, along with CTOs Richard Freeman and Vishesh Duggar. The company said that it has matched $2tn of healthcare contracts and tenders for pharmaceutical products, medical devices, healthcare services and medical technologies in more than 70 countries.

“The healthcare industry is still spending 40pc of its revenue base on matching buyers and suppliers manually, using legacy systems,” Mehta said. “This is a time-consuming process that costs hospitals money while hampering the ability of suppliers to position new technologies. We want to put an end to that.

“Vamstar is introducing data-driven decision making in the $8.4tn global healthcare supply chain to replace manual processes in sourcing and procurement. Connected transaction-level data is critical to lead the transformation of the healthcare supply chain and has the potential to unlock tremendous value.”

Jan-Hendrik Buerk, principal at Btov, added: “An increasing need for competitive, diversified and transparent sourcing approaches and the manifestation of value-based tendering and procurement ​create the foundation for a future infrastructure platform in healthcare procurement.

“Having known the company since its very early days, we were able to eye-witness the impressive and rapid development of Vamstar over the last few months.”

Lisa Ardill was careers editor at Silicon Republic until June 2021

editorial@siliconrepublic.com