Startup Stories: Curbing the Spread of Counterfeit Medicine
Adebayo Alonge ’16 and Amy Kao ’17 founded RxAll, a digital ecosystem that helps African pharmacies and public health agencies distribute high-quality medicines while preventing the sale of counterfeit products.
To mark the 10-year anniversary of Yale SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship, we’re checking in with alums who benefitted from the program’s resources when launching their ventures.
When Adebayo Alonge ’16 and Amy Kao ’17 co-founded the healthcare startup RxAll as students at Yale School of Management, they offered one product: a hand-held scanner powered by artificial intelligence that could authenticate medicines for patients, helping protect people from counterfeit drugs.
Several years later, RxAll is an entire digital ecosystem connecting patients, pharmacies, drugmakers, and public health agencies across several African countries. The company now employs over 50 people, serves more than 5,000 pharmacies, and provides high-quality medications to nearly three million patients in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. The company also offers financing to pharmacies in its network, 60 percent of which are owned by women.
“The vision is much broader now,” says Alonge, who serves as chief executive officer. “Initially, we were focused on authenticating medicines. Now, we’re raising the standards of health care delivery across Africa.”
The founding duo have a personal stake in RxAll’s success. Both Alonge and Kao, now the company’s strategic advisor and chief marketing officer, had to navigate health scares after ingesting fake drugs. Alonge came to SOM specifically to create a company that could curb the distribution of counterfeit medicines around the world.
Alonge and Kao say their time at SOM—especially the resources they accessed through the Program on Entrepreneurship—was invaluable. When launching RxAll, the pair relied on mentorship from SOM lecturer Robert A. Bettigole ’83 and courses on entrepreneurial finance, private equity and venture capital, and strategic leadership with Elon Boms ’07, David Cromwell, and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. They also participated in the Yale Center for Biomedical Innovation & Technology Healthcare Hackathon and received a grant from the Yale School of Public Health.
In the coming months, RxAll expects to close its Series A funding round—the company raised $3.15 million in seed and pre-seed funding in 2020 and 2021—and to expand its operations into several other countries in Africa. The founders hope to eventually launch programs in Asia as well.
“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 says.
