Translation By: Fairouz Alnajem

Cura Saudi Arabia, the leading telemedicine consultancy, has succeeded in raising $4 million (about 15 million Saudi Riyals) in its Series A funding round. The first funding round was led by Wa'ed (the entrepreneurial arm of Saudi Aramco) and ELM. In the following lines, we will learn about the journey of the rise of Saudi Cura and the services it provides.

Birth of the idea of Cura

The idea of establishing Cura was born as a result of a situation experienced by one of its founders, Wael Kabli, a former Microsoft engineer, when he noticed his daughter one night showing signs of tiredness and sickness, and tried to contact a doctor, but the latter told him that the best thing to do was to take an appointment to see his daughter in The next morning, and he did, and the result was that the doctor gave Wael and his wife simple steps to take care of their daughter from home, then Wael thought that it was unreasonable that there was no way to obtain medical advice in critical cases in which it was impossible to reach a doctor, hence the idea of   establishing Cura company by Wael Kabli and his friend, software engineer Muhammad Zikr Allah in 2016.

Cura Services

Cura operates through an application on smartphones bearing its name. The application enables the medical consultation requester to communicate with a doctor via electronic messaging or via video directly (in real time), as well as the requester can obtain prescriptions online, as well as the “Afiya” program to provide advice on depression, stress, chronic diseases, nutrition and others of lifestyle issues.

Currently, more than 4,500 doctors are working in Cura. They have provided their medical services to about 350,000 users since the launch of the Cura application. Cura relies on providing its services to the Saudi market, as the percentage of Saudi users of the application reaches about 95%.

Planning global

The startup plans to use the funding to improve the user experience, offering more services to both individual users and partner customers, such as collecting blood samples from patients' houses, and offering employee health benefits that can be integrated with insurance companies. It also puts on its agenda the expansion of the platform's work to become more global during the upcoming five years.