My Business: Clinic delays pushed this 25-year-old to build a pharmacy startup

Dubai: A clinic visit that stretched from 11 am until 3.30 pm gave two Dubai entrepreneurs the idea for a healthcare technology business designed to reduce the time doctors, pharmacists and patients lose to outdated systems.

Sreecharan, co-founder of Neulink, visited a well-known clinic for severe neck pain and migraines, but repeated registration failures and system crashes delayed the consultation before it began.

“The doctor was not diagnosing the patient, he was troubleshooting software,” Mahmoud Suliman, Neulink’s 25-year-old Sudanese co-founder, said.

A separate experience at a hospital soon revealed another problem. Medication was available on the pharmacy shelf, but the system listed it as out of stock, leading to a 45-minute delay before the insurance claim was processed.

“When we compared our stories, we realised this was not a one-off issue. Dispensing medication is slow everywhere, and pharmacies are running on solutions that were never built for the speed healthcare demands today. That is what pushed us to build Neulink.”

From solar engineering to healthcare technology

Born and raised in the UAE, the founder holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Solar and Alternate Energy and began experimenting with business ideas while studying at university.

He designed and fabricated a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle with a batchmate and later launched an online auction-based marketplace as his first company. He was also selected among the top 25 Ideators at the Hello Business Pitch 3 by e&.

Entrepreneurship was familiar at home, with his father running a law firm in the UAE, although his original plan was to secure a job in his field after graduation.

That changed when he began selling sought-after luxury products during his final year and found that he enjoyed working directly with customers.

“That is when I realised I wanted to build something of my own,” he said.

Grants funded the first product

Neulink initially relied on grants received from the Ministry of Education and the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority after the co-founders won pitching competitions.

Money from the founder’s previous venture was added to those grants, allowing the team to develop a minimum viable product and begin pilots with retail pharmacies.

The company received its first external cheque after joining the Sanabil Accelerator by Orbit Ventures, an achievement the founder considers Neulink’s biggest success so far.

“Joining the Sanabil Accelerator by Orbit Ventures validated what we are building and gave us access to the Saudi market at a stage where that kind of exposure matters most,” Suliman said.

Learning healthcare from scratch

Neither founder had a medical background, requiring them to understand how pharmacies operate, how different healthcare entities interact and how regulations vary between markets.

Support from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund has helped the company engage with government and enterprise organisations to present and implement its ideas.

The founder said the UAE’s startup ecosystem gave entrepreneurs the opportunity to test ideas and build businesses, while Dubai was the natural location for Neulink because it was where he was born and first encountered the problem the company is trying to solve.

The pull of a regular job

The founder has never held a full-time nine-to-five job, although he completed a three-month internship at a Dubai Electricity and Water Authority subsidiary.

A conventional career occasionally appeared more attractive during periods when Neulink’s progress was difficult to see, but he continued working towards the targets set by the founding team.

Neulink’s five-year goal is to become the region’s leading end-to-end pharmacy management platform.

His advice to other founders is to focus on a genuine customer need and choose a co-founder who shares the same ambition for the business.

“Build something that people want and keep pushing towards it. Doubt is something you will come across, but it should not be the reason you stop.”