Tibu Health secures financing facility from Proparco to scale its Minute Clinics

What's the deal? Tibu HealthDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Kenyan healthtech startup, has secured a financing facility from ProparcoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the French development finance institution, through the Bridge Fund by Digital AfricaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The funding will accelerate the rollout of its "Minute Clinics" — small primary care units embedded in high-traffic locations like pharmacies and supermarkets across Kenya.

Founded in 2020 by Jason Carmichael, Tibu Health targets middle-income and underserved populations who lack consistent access to affordable medical care. It operates ten Minute Clinics across four Kenyan counties, including Nairobi, and has delivered over 45,000 diagnoses and 2,500 vaccines to date.

The company runs a "hub-and-spoke" model: small clinics serve as neighbourhood entry points, backed by a central hub offering specialist services like medical imaging, paediatrics, and gynaecology.

Why now? Kenya's primary care infrastructure still leaves large swathes of urban and peri-urban populations reliant on self-medication. Tibu Health's proximity-based model directly addresses that gap, and the Proparco financing arrives as the startup looks to scale significantly beyond its current footprint.

Djalal Khimdjee, deputy chief executive of Proparco, praised the model's ability to serve lower-income patients affordably. Carmichael said embedding clinics within existing infrastructure — rather than building standalone facilities — is the key to making primary care financially sustainable in emerging markets.

What could go wrong? Rapid expansion of healthcare delivery in resource-constrained settings carries real risks. Maintaining clinical quality across a growing network of small-format clinics is a persistent challenge, especially when specialist support flows from a single hub. Regulatory hurdles and the economics of serving price-sensitive patients could also slow growth.

The signal: Proparco's backing via Digital Africa's Bridge Fund underscores growing DFI appetite for early-growth healthtech in Africa that prioritises asset-light, embedded infrastructure over traditional hospital builds. For Tibu Health, still in its early growth stage with just ten clinics, the challenge now is proving the hub-and-spoke model can replicate efficiently enough to justify that institutional confidence at scale.