Nigerian anti-counterfeiting startup Chekkit has secured additional funding to help it scale its blockchain-powered drug safety and tracking solution.
Formed at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana in 2018, Chekkit has built a platform that tracks product movement and the parties involved in the transfer of products from warehouse to distributor, and on to the final consumer.
Essentially, Chekkit is an anti-counterfeiting, asset tracking and consumer feedback analytics tool. It produces tamper-proof unique ID labels, either as QR codes or numeric codes, which can be placed on premium packaged food and beverage products for supply chain and consumer feedback tracking.
The startup has so far helped secure over 50 million pharmaceutical and consumer goods products, and is set for further growth after Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said pharmaceutical products would be mandated to implement end-to-end serialisation and traceability from the end of 2024.
To help take advantage of this opportunity to scale, Chekkit has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Adaverse, a Cardano ecosystem accelerator, with participation from existing investors like RTA, HoaQ, Launch Africa Ventures, and Blockchain Founders Fund. This comes after Chekkit was announced as the first approved GS1/NAFDAC traceability solutions provider in Nigeria, and follows a US$500,000 pre-seed funding round it secured in 2021.
The funds will help Chekkit onboard more manufacturers across Nigeria and other regions in Africa, while also expanding to new markets in India, UK and the Middle East.
“Since raising our pre-seed round of US$500,000 in 2021, Chekkit has partnered and integrated its pharmaceutical traceability and consumer intelligence solution with SAP, enabling pharmaceutical brands that already use SAP’s Advanced Track and Trace Platform to be able to collect and analyse last-mile patient data. The company has also integrated the GS1 global standards system, making our serialisation software regulatory compliant in over 100 countries globally,” said Dare Odumade, Chekkit’s CEO.
“We are currently exploring opportunities to optimise and strengthen supply chains for other African and Middle Eastern regions through partnerships with major pharmaceutical donors, manufacturers, governments, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). We are focusing a side of the business on fixing the public pharmaceutical supply chains of these low to middle-income earning countries.”
Vincent Li, founding partner at Adaverse, said Chekkit was not just another anti-counterfeiting solution.
“Rather, it aims to repair the prevailing rift in consumer-manufacturer trust with the blockchain-secured channel, prioritising consumer insights. We see the potential to transform the supply chain industry and disrupt the DataFi market and we’re excited to support the scaling of Chekkit’s infrastructure,” he said.
This article first appeared on enews.com.ng.
