Across Nigeria and many parts of Africa, patients walk into public hospitals to get tested for infectious diseases such as HIV and TB. Once the test results are available, they are manually recorded on paper and a local government supervisor does the rounds to collate these results and funnel them to state and national levels. This allows national health officials to understand the disease burden and ensure follow up and treatment of patients that test positive. The traditional test-diagnose-collate-distribute process usually takes more than 30 days by which time some patients have lost their lives or have already infected others.
This state of affairs creates a very significant problem and health risk. We are excited to announce our Series A investment in SystemOne (through our partnership with TPG Growth and TPG Rise Fund). Simply put, SystemOne is an infectious disease diagnostics company. The company’s GxAlert® and Aspect® platforms ensure that the time and knowledge gap between diagnosis and reporting is closed by disseminating test results in real-time to clinicians, health ministries, regional/global health funders and patients. By providing health officials with instant notifications and up-to-date dashboards, SystemOne delivers real-time understanding and decision support for disease trends, device functionality, error rates and more.
SystemOne’s platforms are multi-device (including RDTs) and multi-disease such that health officials and funders can have single line-of-sight into all diseases across every diagnostic device in a region. The company has connected over 2,000 diagnostic devices in 40+ countries and has automatically transmitted over 5 million diagnostic results.
We liked SystemOne for several reasons – one of which was that it was solving a very large problem. $25.7bn is being spent annually on TB and HIV. However, the detection rates in places like Nigeria are still as low as 17% for TB. Millions of dollars are wasted in consumables such as MTB/RIF ultra-cartridges because of the lack of insight into inventory levels. Diagnostic devices are left inoperative for periods of time with patients left untested, because there are no mechanisms to alert senior health officials or device manufacturers. SystemOne provides insight for, and into, all the constituencies thereby generating more value for money and arming funders and national health officials with the necessary real-time data. The excitement we heard when we spoke to some of the customers was palpable – “We have been waiting for a solution like this!” The product-market fit has led to significantly low churn with many customers renewing after the end of their contract period.
The SystemOne solution is the only solution in this space that is uniquely designed for developing markets to address issues around power, data shortage, connectivity, technical know-how and language. The on-the-ground support also provided makes implementation and operation easy.
SystemOne’s co-founder and CEO, Chris Macek previously founded Relyon Solutions, a company that developed large-scale software applications for government projects, the World Bank and universities. Along with his co-founders – Nicolas Boillot and Stefan Baumgartner – they have immersed themselves in this problem set and, with this Series A financing, they will be working on not just detecting but linking every positive diagnosis to treatment to help move the world steps closer to the attainment of the UN’s 90-90-90 goal.
We are very excited to welcome Chris, Nicolas, Stefan and team to the portfolio and grateful to partner with an incredibly driven group as they deliver global impact!