Axmed, a Swiss HealthTech company, today announced it has been awarded €5 million ($6 million) in non-dilutive grant funding from the Gates Foundation to expand access to high-quality, affordable medicines across low- and middle-income countries through its B2B procurement and integrated logistics platform.
The grant builds on the Foundation’s prior €4.2 million ($5 million). With additional backing from Founderful Ventures, the company has now raised a total of €11 million ($13 million) in capital to date.
“This funding allows us to scale what already works while we bring in aligned long-term capital,” says Emmanuel Akpakwu, Founder and CEO of Axmed. “With the continued support of the Gates Foundation, our focus is disciplined execution at scale: strengthening procurement systems, improving affordability, and ensuring high-quality medicines reliably reach the people who depend on them.”
In the broader 2025–2026 HealthTech landscape, several adjacent rounds illustrate continued capital flow into healthcare delivery and digital infrastructure.
Germany’s Qrago (Stuttgart) secured €2.7 million to digitise healthcare logistics and transport operations, while UK-based Wanda Health raised €2.1 million to scale its intelligent virtual care platform aimed at reducing hospital readmissions.
At a larger ticket size, UK women’s health platform SheMed closed a €43 million round to expand personalised preventative healthcare services.
Together, these rounds amount to approximately €47.8 million in disclosed funding across digital health and healthcare operations segments.
Within this 2025–2026 cohort, capital deployment reflects investor interest in improving healthcare system efficiency, whether through logistics digitisation, virtual care, or specialised service platforms, situating Axmed’s grant within a wider trend of infrastructure-oriented HealthTech investment.
“Although Axmed is a young organisation, their model of leveraging a technology-enabled marketplace to improve access to essential medicines in emerging markets is both innovative and essential,” adds Denise Tuiime Mutambi, Director of Planning and Procurement at Joint Medical Stores. “They have demonstrated an exceptional ability to navigate global healthcare supply chain complexity and translate strategy into measurable and sustainable impact.”
Founded in 2023, Axmed is a technology-enabled B2B marketplace and logistics platform that connects buyers, manufacturers, and distributors to streamline procurement and delivery of essential medicines across low- and middle-income countries.
By combining pooled demand, data-driven sourcing, and integrated international logistics, Axmed reduces costs, increases supply reliability, and expands patient access to quality-assured healthcare products.
The company also counts with regional headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.
The new funding will accelerate Axmed’s expansion across Africa and support procurement programmes spanning multiple therapeutic areas, including family planning and malaria products serving mothers, children, and underserved patient populations across LMICs over the next 12 to 18 months.
Since launch, Axmed has developed a geo-agnostic pooled procurement and logistics platform purpose-built for fragmented and supply-constrained healthcare markets. In 2025 alone, the platform delivered more than 1,800 metric tonnes of healthcare products and reached over 4.2 million patients, up from approximately 750,000 in 2024. Over the same period, Axmed recorded 12x year-on-year revenue growth and maintained an average 70% repeat purchase rate.
Through demand aggregation, price transparency, and coordinated international logistics, the platform reportedly generates 30 to 35% cost savings for customers.
Axmed plans to operate in more than 20 countries by the end of 2026, with a target of reaching 50 million patients within three years and over 100 million within five years, positioning the platform as a core infrastructure layer for medicines procurement in underserved markets.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/02/gates-foundation-backs-basels-axmed-with-e5-million-to-support-affordable-medicines-distribution/
