Yale Graduates Create Device Capable Of Detecting Counterfeit Drugs

RxAll now employs over 50 people and serves over 5,000 pharmacies in its network. The company's founding vision, however, still very much guides Alonge and Kao, who told the Yale School of Medicine as much.

Three Yale graduates created a device that can detect the presence of counterfeit drugs after launching a healthcare startup in 2016. Adebayo Alonge, Amy Kao, and Wei Lui launched RxAll in 2016 as a response to their experiences with counterfeit drugs.

According to Afrotech, the trio’s company soon created its first product, RxScanner, a device that lets users authenticate the quality of medicines within 20 seconds. The device pairs artificial intelligence with machine learning to produce a 99.99% accuracy rate.

The company’s vision has now scaled to match its ambitious first product; RxAll is now on a path to provide drug delivery services to over 3 million patients in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda and serves as a marketplace for pharmacies and wholesalers to make sure drugs are both safe and affordable for their patients.

“The vision is much broader now,” Alonge told the Yale School of Medicine. “Now, we’re raising the standards of health care delivery across Africa.”

The company has also scaled in size proportional to the funds it received from the Yale School of Health and its current round of Series A funding, which has raised $3.15 million for the young company.

RxAll now employs over 50 people and serves over 5,000 pharmacies in its network. The company’s founding vision, however, still very much guides Alonge and Kao, who told the Yale School of Medicine as much.

The trio founded their company after they experienced traumatic events relating to counterfeit drugs. Alonge told Techcrunch about an experience with counterfeit diazepam that landed him in a coma for nearly a month.

“I survived a 21-day coma in Nigeria 15 years ago. My co-founder, Amy, was hospitalized in Thailand after taking counterfeit medicine. And Wei lost a family member due to contaminated drugs,” Alonge said.

He continued, “After going through that, information out there further confirmed that what we experienced wasn’t a one-off situation. It’s an ongoing problem; 100,000 Africans die from this problem every year. One million people die across the world from this problem.”

“Just knowing that we can prevent at least one person from having to go through the traumatic experiences that we went through—that’s very much the driving force,” Kao told the Yale School of Medicine.

The product has received rave reviews from Zachariah George, the managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures, a leader of the funding round for RxAll.

George told Techcrunch, “Launch Africa Ventures is excited to be co-leading this round of financing into a strong, experienced team at RxAll. We believe that RxAll is bridging a major gap in access to quality healthcare in Africa by pioneering a drug delivery platform to enable pharmacies and patients to buy authenticated medicines online. The ability to achieve favorable unit economics and multiple revenue streams by leveraging anti-counterfeiting mobile spectrometer technology, owning the entire drug delivery supply chain and their own payment wallet, provides a massive growth and scaling opportunity across Africa and beyond.”

Duncan Turner, general partner at SOSV and managing director of HAX, told the outlet that he believes the company has a bright future.

“We’ve been incredibly impressed by RxAll’s ability to scale and meet customer demand. In just the last year, the team has brought together world-class hard tech and operational excellence to solve pressing issues for over a million Nigerians, and we couldn’t be more excited by their vision for the broader pharmaceutical market.”

As Alonge told Harvard Innovation Labs, that vision revolves around ensuring Africans have access to quality controlled medication, a problem plaguing the continent.

“The other platforms in the digital health [space] were trying to replace the existing players… looking to roll up pharmacies…or wholesales,” Alonge told the outlet. “But the issue was [that] they were not really solving a problem; there was already an existing supply chain of wholesalers and pharmacies. What was missing was the quality piece. Most of the existing players were not doing any kind of quality assurance. There are very few businesses in Africa, or otherwise in the startup phase that get to this level of profitability at the frequency and speed at which we did.”