Arogga, a leading digital health platform offering medicine delivery nationwide across Bangladesh, announced that it has successfully closed a $1.3m round of seed funding with participation from Hyper, Ratio Ventures, Sketchnote Partners, SRB Ventures, Demand Curve’s CEO Julian Shapiro, IDLC, and a few other Silicon Valley super angels. The round brings the total financing raised by Arogga to date to $1.6 million.
In a statement, Co-founder and CEO Rosina Mazumder said: “At Arogga, we want to make an impact in the healthcare area to solve the problem of counterfeit drugs in Bangladesh. Our goal is to provide access to affordable, genuine medicine conveniently to everyone. We’re very excited to have been backed by some of the top investors from Silicon Valley, especially to be the first Bangladeshi startup to be part of the Hyper program.”
Arogga was successfully selected and funded as part of Season 2022’s Hyper program, which kicked off in San Francisco last month. Each startup goes through a four-week founder program and gets access to Hyper’s special partners, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), AngelList, Sequoia Capital, The Twenty Minute VC Podcast, and Product Hunt.
Shahed Khan, Co-founder of Hyper, said: “Arogga has a unique opportunity to significantly improve the pharmaceutical experience for patients in Bangladesh, leading to better treatment adherence and patient outcomes. While we’ve made investments in the South Asian region, we’re excited thatArogga is our first bet in the emerging Bangladeshi market because of our high conviction in the Co-founders with their ambitious vision.”
With this raise, Arogga plans to bolster its tech, product, and operational teams in order to grow and scale. Co-founder and CTO Shamim Hasan said: “Our mission and vision is to bring healthcaresolutions to people’s doorstep. Following this raise, I’m excited to grow our tech team to enhance ourproduct offerings and provide better services. We feel proud our efforts at Arogga will bring ourcountry’s vision of making ‘Digital Bangladesh’ one step closer.”
Bangladesh’s pharmaceutical market is estimated to be at least $3.5 billion in size, and set to grow to $6 billion in 2025 Despite the size and growth, the market remains fragmented, with inefficient and expensive distribution and supply chain issues, further complicated by over 20% of medicines in pharmacies being counterfeit. Investors in this round are excited about the opportunity in Bangladesh.
Julio Arias, Managing Director of Sketchnote Partners, said: “We’re proud to support Arogga in itsmission to make healthcare and pharmaceutical products more accessible to Bangladeshi consumers.Rosina and her team have displayed tremendous leadership, and we’re honored to partner withthem.”
Julian Shapiro, Demand Curve’s CEO, also said: “There are so many open opportunities for softwarein Bangladesh, and it’s exciting to back a category as important as medicine.”
Alongside the foreign investors in this round, Arogga also secured investment from local BangladeshiVC IDLC. Samad Miraly, Partner at IDLC VC Fund I, said: “We’re excited to support the growth ofArogga and healthtech in Bangladesh. As a local institutional VC, we aim to unlock value forArogga beyond capital in this financing round to help it grow into the important company we know itcan become. We hope this is just the beginning with this exciting company and team.”
Cover photo: Co-founders; Shamim Hasan, Fahad Hossain, Rosina Mazumder, and Yawar Mehboob (from left to right)
