Saudi Aramco investment arm Wa’ed signs up for telehealth startup Cura’s SR15m Series A round

Dubai: Wa’ed, the entrepreneur funding arm of Saudi Aramco, is one of the investors who turned up for the telehealth startup Cura’s Series A funding of SR15 million. Cure will provide an online platform for effecting a range of healthcare services, such as online prescriptions and wellness programmes for issues such as depression and stress.

Another investor who joined the funding round is ELM, which is an active player in the Saudi government and private sectors.

“It’s definitely exciting times for the digital health industry in the region, specially post COVID-19 pandemic,” said said Mohammad Zekrallah, co-founder and CTO at Cura, which was the first licensed telemedicine company in the Kingdom. “We have seen tremendous month over month growth during the lockdown and we can’t wait to keep innovating our technology and services to help people in need live their healthiest and most convenient life-style we can possibly offer them.”

Cura was launched in 2016 by software engineers Wael Kabli and Zekrallah. It thus became the first Saudi-based platform to launch on-demand online health and wellness services, offering instant consultations with a doctor 24x7.

More than 4,500 doctors are registered in the platform, and Cura assisted around 350,000 users connect to the a professional since 2016, of whom the majority reside in the kingdom. Non- Saudi Arabia based consultations represent 5 per cent of its overall customer base, and the founders plan to undertake an international expansion in the next three- to five years.

“Our investment in Cura comes as recognition to acknowledge the incredible milestones that the founding team was able to achieve,” said Fahad Alidi, Managing Director at Wa’ed.

Cura had close collaboration with the Saudi Ministry of Health to work on digitizing the health sector as a whole and to develop the foundational structure for telemedicine further. This helped create the ministry’s national telemedicine mobile application, Sehha, through which Cura’s licensed technology was able to deliver over 2.8 million consultations.