BrazilDubai’s Klaim bags funding and wins tech innovation competition
Dubai-based insurtech platform Klaim has enjoyed a flying start to the post-summer season, roping in $1.6 million in fresh funding days after it was named the winner of a UAE tech innovation competition.
Launched in 2019, Klaim has as its mission to “help healthcare providers get paid what they’re owed, on time.” While it may seem trivial, the company is trying to solve a major problem. According to one analysis of claims, insurance companies in the UAE on average take 113 days to reimburse outstanding medical claims to providers. In 10% of the cases this period can even take more than a year.
“This is a severe problem impacting the industry since capital tied up with insurers cannot be invested in improving the quality of healthcare,” said Klaim co-founder and CEO, Karim Dakki.
This is where Klaim comes in. The company provides healthcare providers with a ‘factoring as a service’ offering, which sees them buy healthcare claims from providers in return for liquidity upfront, allowing them to “prioritise high-quality medical care and grow their practice.” Meanwhile, Klaim’s tech-enabled platform deals with the full medical claims reimbursement process in an agile and effective manner.
While factoring is by no means new to the Middle East, the proposition is typically “limited to large companies in the Middle East,” said Dakki. “We make the process very accessible and specific to the needs of healthcare providers.”
Having previously raised $1.1 million in funding, Klaim has now raised an additional $1.6 million in funding in a pre-series A round led by Saudi Arabia’s Mad’a Investments. Additional investors include Arzan Venture Capital, Wealth Well, and Techstars. The capital will be used to expand the platform, support further growth in the United Arab Emirates, and enable expansion into the Saudi and US markets.
Meanwhile, Klaim last week also was named the winner of the KPMG Tech Innovator in the UAE competition. Klaim was among five tech scale-ups who reached the finals, and “stood out as the deserving winner with its innovative technologies, business model and the potential to scale up globally,” explained Anurag Bajpai, a partner at KPMG Lower Gulf.
The pitches of the finalists were vetted across six equally-weighted criteria, including disruption & innovation, market potential, customer adoption, market traction and marketing, long-term potential, and pitch quality.
As the winner of the UAE edition, Klaim qualifies for KPMG’s Global Tech Innovator competition finals in Lisbon this November. In Portugal, the insurtech will compete with the competition’s winners from sixteen different countries.
