3 things I learned as the founder of an AI healthcare startup in Lagos

Meet Adeola Ayoola, the co-founder of Famasi Africa, a digital pharmacy that makes getting your medication easier. Adeola’s early career in healthcare — at the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria — unearthed an issue she was motivated to solve: how to make the process of locating and receiving important medications less painful and unpredictable.

Early on Adeola saw the reality of where things can go wrong, meeting a 9-year-old boy, born with HIV, who found it difficult to walk without getting out of breath, yet had to regularly journey to the hospital to pick up his antiretrovirals in person. It felt like just one more unnecessary hurdle for someone sick to have to deal with.

Fast forward to Adeola launching Famasi with her co-founder Umar Faruq Akinwunmi, digitising the pharmacy experience to get medications delivered to people with ease — and empower pharmacists to streamline their operations using technology, including the introduction of an AI ‘care assistant’.

In 2023, Famasi joined Google for Startups Accelerator: AI-First to dig into how they could leverage AI to further scale and improve the business.

Here’s what Adeola learned along the way.

Doing things manually first helped us really understand the problem.

In a sense, we launched with a single tweet — asking people if the sort of service we had in mind would be something they would pay for. We had 133 direct replies in 24 hours with a resounding ‘Yes!’ and this led to our first customers.

Initially, we were delivering the medications ourselves to customers. But as we steadily grew, we started having requests from outside of Lagos and logistics became a nightmare; for example, now we had to find a way to get medications from Lagos all the way to Abuja in 24 hours. It can't happen!

We were also doing customer care ourselves, assigning every customer a ‘care specialist’ to check in on them, since people with lifelong conditions can forget to take their medication until they experience symptoms. Personalisation in healthcare is vital — and getting so close to the process with patients helped us eventually figure out the scalable solution tech could provide.

AI can work to compliment the ‘human’ side of your business

When we joined the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI-First, we were at this point where we were thinking about how to automate things and build for scale. We wanted to understand the sort of AI tools we could use and how they were already being used.

As a result we were able to use AI platforms like Gemma to create something called Remi. Remi is our ‘pharmacy assistant’ and the goal for Remi is to use AI to help the pharmacist better look after and continuously build knowledge about their patients.

What does that look like? When a patient enters a pharmacy, Remi helps perform a triage on screen to quickly understand the patient’s need (via questions like age and symptoms) and, via a series of further prompts, narrows down for the pharmacist what they need to know in order to offer the best service possible. So the customer receives better, more personalised care, and we make life easier and more effective for the pharmacist too.

Even if you’re not technical, learning AI skills can be so empowering

My co-founder was always obsessed with AI but my journey, as someone who wasn’t hugely technical, was more gradual. In my prior career I had worked across the entire pharmacy space and I needed to do something else. So I got very interested in technology and I started to learn programming language and machine learning just for the fun of it. Then I started to think about how I could leverage this new learning in my industry and this is what led to us thinking about the solution we wanted to solve with tech.

What I’ve seen with my colleagues is that AI skills can open up new parts of your job — and hobbies. For example, since the accelerator, people on my team who are product designers are now also building front-end tools with AI. And I’m even using AI to code a game at the moment!

You can find out more about Famasi here.