ISLAMABAD: Pakistan-based health tech platform MedIQ recently announced it has raised $6 million in a series A funding round led by Saudi Arabia’s venture capital Rasmal Ventures and the Kingdom’s investment company, Joa Capital. 

MedIQ was founded by Dr. Saira Siddiqui, a doctor who holds a PhD in Health Economics from the University of Yorkshire, in 2020 in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad. 

The startup aims to redefine health care through a digitally enabled hybrid ecosystem and is currently operating in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Canada.

“This over-subscribed round signals strong investor confidence in our accelerated market traction, validates our excellence in engineering to support in becoming the leading health tech player in MENA, and reinforces the great experience our customers have with MedIQ Solutions,” the platform said in a LinkedIn post on May 4. 

“With fresh capital, a focused team, and a purpose-driven founder, MedIQ is now primed to scale across the GCC to become a regional leader,” it added. 

The company, which expanded into Saudi Arabia in 2023, said it will use the funding to strengthen its technology stack, scale operations in the Kingdom’s health tech market and support entry into Qatar and neighboring Gulf markets.

In an interview with Arab News in 2023, Dr. Siddiqui expressed her desire to see the platform expand across GCC countries. 

Siddiqui had said women were the bulk users of MedIQ’s products as it is usually hard for them to visit hospitals without male companions in Pakistan and the Middle East. 

“According to the figures which we have, about 74 percent of our users are women and [the] women having children or dependents such as older parents,” she had said.