VIEBEG Technologies Inc

In developing countries, every minute five people die because of limited capacity of medical care. People in remote areas have to move long distances to access proper health services and often die because they cannot even afford the journey. Medical supply shortage due to weak infrastructure and poor inventory management / procurement are the biggest culprits.

Our AI-powered solution de-risks and optimizes medical supply by taking control of every aspect of the medical supply and demand network in hard to serve markets, allowing healthcare providers to procure automatically, transparently and efficiently via our marketplace.

Affordability: We link the manufacturers directly to the end-users.

Accessibility: Our AI solutions ensure that the needed medical products are always available at the hospital.  

De-risking: Our AI predicts supply shortages, epidemics and other shocks ahead of time, to prevent health crises.

In developing countries, every minute five people die because of limited capacity of medical care. People in remote areas have to move long distances to access proper health services and often die because they cannot even afford the journey.

Even though only 17 % of the world’s population live in Africa, Africa shares 30% of the world’s disease burden. 67% of disease-related deaths can be attributed to preventable causes and the broken supply chain of medical supply in Africa. More than 50% of Africans don‘t have access to decent medical supply in part because they live in places that are hard to serve with traditional methods. 

Accessibility and affordability are still the biggest challenge to healthcare delivery in Africa, given broken supply chain, the financial constrains and poor stock management by private and public healthcare providers.

Most manufacturers/ suppliers recognize the huge potential of Africa but fear to enter the market without a reliable local partner because they lack the resources, market understanding and experience, resulting in less medical supply/ lower accessibility. 

By optimizing medical supply through our AI-powered Inventory Management and Procurement System, VIEBEG will make healthcare affordable and accessible all over Africa and save millions of lives.

Marketplace: Our platform connects pre-selected manufacturers/ suppliers, who store their products in our fulfillment centers, with healthcare providers.

Market access: Manufacturers/ suppliers select in which of our markets they want to operate, grant us an exclusive distributorship of their products and we take care of every aspect of the supply chain.

Inventory Management: Our solution keeps track of the inventory of our healthcare providers, saves procurement costs and increases the product range by optimizing stock with our AI-powered reasoning. We collect data via our inventory management software, our online marketplace and our sensors that are included in all our shipped products and through our automated solution, make sure that for each product, sufficient minimum quantities are always available at the hospital.

AI: Advanced pattern mining, pattern recognition and anomaly detection for early warning systems (outbreaks of disease or climate events). Reasoning systems for adaptive autonomous real time decisions.

Delivery: Manufacturers/ suppliers list their products on our platform and store their products in our fulfillment centers, from which the products are supplied to our customers. If the threshold for the minimum quantity available set by the healthcare provider is exceeded, VIEBEG automatically delivers new supply. 

Our solution serves people in developing countries who don't have access to affordable healthcare because of limited medical supply. After having served Africans in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo for the past two years, we have identified the target population to be low-income individuals and families in remote areas who have to move long distances to access proper health services and often die because they cannot even afford the journey. Healthcare providers in remote  areas in developing countries ofter don't have the financial capacity to stock all the required products and have to wait for days, if not weeks, for adequate medical supply, making it impossible to offer decent treatment to their patients. The people who suffer the most from limited medical supply are the poorest who cannot afford traveling to advanced hospitals with good infrastructure. Our AI-powered solution makes sure that a minimum quantity of each medical product that is needed, is always available at affordable prices. This will enable remote healthcare providers to be able to offer their services at lower prices, thus increasing their revenue and ultimately, serving the low income population in remote areas, eliminating the need to travel long distance in order to be treated. 

Our solution aligns to the challenge in that it provides a surveillance system for disease outbreaks. The data that we gather through our inventory management software and our sensors power VIEBEG's anomaly detection for early warning systems. We monitor the current demand for medical products and the occupancy rate of hospital beds in each region that we serve, predicting epidemics ahead of time. We improve medical supply chains and strengthen access to affordable healthcare with our AI-powered procurement system that predicts supply shortages and supply shocks (such as climate crisis, civil unrest, etc) ahead of time, to prevent health crises. 

We transform the way medical products are bought and sold, advancing the 4th industrial revolution in the developing world.

Our AI-powered solution de-risks and optimizes medical supply by taking control of every aspect of the medical supply and demand network in hard to serve markets, allowing healthcare providers to procure automatically, transparently and efficiently via our marketplace. We collect data via our inventory management software, our online marketplace and our sensors that are included in all our shipped products and through our automated solution, make sure that for each product, sufficient minimum quantities are always available at the hospital.

Unlike other medical supply companies, such as Henry Schein, Johnson & Johnson or Patterson companies who also focus on Inventory Optimisation, VIEBEG does not use traditional delivery. These competitors don't deliver in challenging environments and don't supply minimum quantities that are made available at any time at the hospital through AI centric procurement and inventory optimisation. Moreover, they don't offer a marketplace that links international suppliers and manufacturers directly to the end user (healthcare providers). 

On the other hand, Zipline and mPahrma, two VC-backed start-ups that also use non-traditional delivery and deliver in challenging environments (Africa), are not AI centric and also don't offer an online marketplace. Our solution is unique in that it links suppliers directly to healthcare providers and takes care of every single aspect of the medical supply chain, from transportation to storage, to payment, thereby de-risking supplying in challenging environments and opening market access to Africa. 

We build AI to anticipate shocks of all kinds, from supply shocks to climate events, to civil unrest, to ultimately deliver live-saving health products in challenging environments, just in time. Our fully automated AI-powered procurement system adapts to highly contextual situations. This means that we use reasoning algorithms, not just pattern learning. AI that can reason about the unprecedented.

We collect data via our inventory management software, our online marketplace and our sensors that are included in all our shipped products and through our automated solution, make sure that for each product, sufficient minimum quantities are always available at the hospital.

-Advanced pattern mining, pattern recognition and anomaly detection for early warning systems (outbreaks of disease, civil wars or climate events) and reasoning systems for adaptive autonomous real time decisions

-Real time data from sensors and remote sensing. Sensors in all shipped equipment, paraphernalia and drones. Remote sensing using satellite images. 

Online retailers, such as Amazon, are already using AI to make the inventory management process less manual and more automated. AI is used to track and record sales automatically and to real-time monitor the progress from manufacture to delivery. Amazon's AI, for example, is gathering data on consumer preference and predicts future demand for each of their products. This improves manufacturing and procurement decisions and reduces the probability of stockouts. 

Similarly, big corporations are using smart computer algorithms/ AI to improve their strategic sourcing. AI helps companies like Walmart to improve their decision-making in terms of procurement.

But also suppliers are increasingly using AI to monitor supply chain disruption and optimise their manufacturing process, such as when to manufacture which products and which quantity. 

Our solution adopts most of these concepts and combines AI procurement and inventory management optimisation with our innovative online marketplace. Our business model of linking manufacturers and suppliers directly to the end user, thereby cutting out the middleman, has been successfully implemented by Amazon. The company's fulfillment centers stock products from manufacturers, market their products online  and then deliver the products on demand directly to the end user, taking care of every step of the supply chain. 

What has not been done yet, is our comprehensive solution that links a marketplace for medical supply (similar to Amazon) with AI-powered inventory management software for healthcare providers, thereby making the supply chains more efficient and transparent. 

By providing hospitals with our AI-powered solution, the short-term outcome will be increased transparency for healthcare providers when it comes to procurement. Products can be easily procured online without having to contact every single supplier in the country until you find the products needed. Moreover, our inventory management software helps healthcare providers to improve stock keeping and automatically supplies products before they go out of stock. As a result, hospitals will have more funds available (improved inventory management) with which they can hire additional nurses and doctors and a wider product range, which will lead to better quality of healthcare services in Sub Saharan Africa.

More importantly, though, are long-term outcomes. By using our solution, hospitals will be able to make more accurate procurement decisions, thus making quality healthcare accessible all over Africa, especially in rural areas that are extremely underserved in Africa. Furthermore, by linking hospitals to the manufacturers, cutting out the middle men, healthcare will become more affordable. 

Our solution is serving 270 hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers in Burundi, Rwanda and Eastern DR Congo. We estimate that our hospitals serve more than 2 million people in the region (we are working with 80% of the biggest hospitals in the region that has approximately 30 million people and estimate the coverage to be 8,5% of the population).

Next year, our goal is to serve 500 hospitals and clinics with more than 6 million people.

In the next 5 years future, we expect to have more than 1000 hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers with more than 30 million people that we will serve. 

Our goal: Reduce costs for medical products by 10% and increase accessibility by 5% every year through our platform. The more we supply to hospitals with our attractive prices (given that we connect them directly to the manufacturers), the more we can decrease the total prices in the regions served (competition also has to follow our prices). 

2020:

Total number of customers: 300; Total Products 1500 products; Total Suppliers: 30; Technology: Version1 of VieProcure, Web & Mobile App used by 250 healthcare providers to request and buy products; Languages: English and French; Impact: reduce costs for medical products by 10%, increase accessibility in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC by 5%

2021:

Total number of customers: 500; Total Products 1800 products; Total Suppliers: 35; Exclusive distributorship: 3; Impact: reduce costs for medical products by 10%, increase accessibility in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC by 5%

2022:

Total number of customers: 700; Increase our product range to 2000 products; Total Suppliers: 40; Exclusive distributorship: 10; Finish Series A round for 8.000.000 USD (1.000.000 USD will be invested in Rwanda). Impact: reduce costs for medical products by 10%, increase accessibility in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC by 5%

2023 & 2024:

Total number of customers: 1200; Total products: 3500; Total suppliers: 60; Exclusive distributorship: 25; Impact: reduce costs for medical products by 10%, increase accessibility in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Zambia, Gabon by 5%

Lives changed: 100 million people

-Financial: Receiving payments from hospitals on time; avoiding payment defaults and fraud

-Technical: Building an AI-powered solution that can precisely predict the usage of medical products in hard-to-serve markets, such as DR Congo, given the infrastructure problems, potential civil unrest, logistics and other factors that are difficult to predict. We want to use AI to predict the unpredictable and HI to predict the predictable. 

-Cultural: Acceptance of using software to procure products online instead of having personal interactions with sales representatives. Creating an understanding of the importance of technology on improving efficiency will may be a challenge, but the increased adoption of software in Africa is giving us optimism.

-Legal: A license for a pharmaceutical wholesale company has to be obtained in every market that we want to operate in. So far, we have succeeded to do so in every market. As long as procedures are followed, the license will be obtained but the process usually takes 6-12 months. 

-Financial: We will develop a Blockchain-based payment platform that makes payments transparent and secure. Each hospital will be verified (preventing fraud), payments will be deducted automatically, thereby reducing credit default. 

-Technical: We want to use AI to predict the unpredictable and HI to predict the predictable. The longer we operate in difficult markets such as DRC, the more data we will collect in order to predict the unpredictable. Human intelligence will also improve, the longer we operate in such markets and the more experience we gain. Our staff will always make the final call and decide which procurement decisions are final.

-Cultural: Software is increasingly becoming more and more important in Africa and smartphones and computers are becoming more accessible to the rising middle class. We will give our software to hospitals to test it for 2 weeks with regular support from our sales team in order to show the advantages of our technology on their procurement and inventory management.

Legal: Our legal team is already experienced with obtaining licenses for a pharmaceutical wholesale company in Rwanda and Burundi and the processes are very similar in our target markets. So far, we have managed to get the license in a record time, in only 5 months instead of 12 months, given the expertise of our team. 

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Our team consists of 21 people:

-CEO (Tobias Reiter)

-CTO (Neville Newey)

-CCO (Alex Musyoka)

CSO (Andreas Reiter)

10 sales executives

6 administrative staff

1 online marketing staff

TOBIAS REITER CEO

As an AI enthusiast and entrepreneur who previously built an AI-based trading software, which was sold to investors, Tobias developed the vision to use AI predictions to serve people’s health needs; especially those who are currently without services.

NEVILLE NEWEY CTO

Neville has been part of several Machine Learning and AI startups, including Lex Machina and Milo.com (bought by eBay). He has extensive industry experience, as Head of Engineering at A^3 by Airbus Group, VP of Engineering at 1-Page, and Director of Data Science at eBay.

ALEX MUSYOKA COO

Growing up in one of the biggest slums in Africa, Alex had direct experience of epidemics caused by medical supply shortages and decided to bring medical supply to the unserved and worked a as sales manager for 8 years at the biggest medical supplier in East Africa.

ANDREAS REITER CSO

Andreas is a renowned Austrian futurist, business consultant and keynote speaker, acknowledged for his insights throughout the German speaking world, advising- clients such as Red Bull, Siemens and Bayer.

JOHANNES CASTNER CINO

Johannes is a data scientist with experience in complexity science, probabilistic graphical models, ontologies, the semantic web and AI algorithms. He previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank and as a data scientist at eBay.

RAEANNA LEWARNE ADVISOR

Raeanna, is a highly experienced clinical/ healthcare expert who holds a PhD in Pharmacy. She worked as Director of Business Development at EnvoyHealth, VP of Clinical Services & Sales at ProCare Rx and Clinical Consultant at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

So far, we are not yet partnering with other organisations. However, we are working with other organisations that help us with product development, such as Partners in Health and American Refugee Committee that are also our customers and share the same goals and vision to make healthcare accessible and affordable in Africa and who are constantly giving us feedback and new ideas on how we can improve our AI-powered solution.

VIEBEG provides an AI-powered inventory management and procurement platform to hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers, completely for free. Hospitals can enter and keep track of their stock via the platform. VIEBEG monitors their stock and based on all the data that we collect, our AI makes accurate predictions on which products and which quantities should be kept in stock at which period of time. Hospitals can set a minimum quantity for each medical product (Medical consumables & disposables, dental products, hospital furniture, general equipment, biomedical equipment)  that they always want to be available at their hospital and VIEBEG automatically supplies the products, whenever the set threshold is surpassed. 

Besides optimising inventory management and automating procurement, hospitals can also use our platform to manually procure medical products in a transparent way, selecting online from our huge product range with detailed descriptions and images and ordering them online. No need to call a myriad of suppliers and inquire prices, go to each office, bargain, transport the products individually to the hospital- with our solution, hospitals can procure efficiently and transparently from a ONE-STOP-SHOP. 

Hospitals pay us directly for the products, with a down payment of 40-60% and three instalments, if the customer is creditworthy. Otherwise, full payment upfront in cash is required. Once the payment is received, after deducting our margin, we immediately transfer the funds to our suppliers, who have stocked the products at our fulfillment centers and taken the inventory risk. 

2020:

 -Revenue of 1.250.000 USD 

-Total number of customers: 300 

 -Total Products 1500 products 

 -Total Suppliers: 30 

 -Technology: Version1 of VieProcure, Web & Mobile App used by 250 healthcare providers 

2021:

-Revenue of 4.900.000 USD (average estimation, given best case and worst case scenario). 

 -Finish Seed Round with 2.500.000 USD by July 2021

 -Total number of customers: 600 

 -Total Products: 1800 products 

 -Total Suppliers: 35 

 -Exclusive distributorship: 3 

2022:

Revenue of 10.300.000 USD (average estimation, given best case and worst case scenario). Expand to Gabon and Republic of the Congo Increase our existing market share in Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, Republic of the Congo and Gabon 

 Total number of customers: 1200; products: 2000 -Total Suppliers: 40-Exclusive distributorship: 10

 -Finish Series A round for 8.000.000 USD 

2023:

-Revenue of 17.450.000 USD (average estimation, given best case and worst case scenario). -Expand to Zambia, Cameroon and Botswana 

Total number of customers: 2000

-Total products: 3000 -Total suppliers: 50 -Exclusive distributorship: 15 -Technology: Version4 of VieProcure, Web & Mobile App used by 1700 healthcare providers to request and buy products; Languages: English, French and Swahili; Software links hospitals directly to manufacturers and local suppliers (SAAS). 90% of our sales come from SAAS, 10% come from our own inventory.

Increase our product range by more than 2000 products; our suppliers by 400;

2024:

-Revenue of 42.950.000 USD 

-Expand to Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola 

Total number of customers: 2500 -Total products: 10000 Total suppliers: 60 -

Finish Series B round for 25.000.000 USD 

We build a state-of-the-art procurement software, develop AI algorithms for predictions, invest in a Blockchain-based payment system and in IOT (sensors) to collect further data and prevent theft.