B2B marketplace Vamstar raises $1.7 million to transform healthcare supply chain

Vamstar, a London-based startup creating an AI-powered B2B marketplace for the healthcare industry, has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by btov, with participation from Antler and Begin Capital. The company wants to transform sourcing and procurement in healthcare — and it seems to already be making quite a dent. Vamstar claims its platform currently matches $2 trillion of healthcare contracts and tenders for pharmaceutical products, medical devices, healthcare services, and other technologies across public and private buyers like hospitals, universities and governments in over 70 countries. “The healthcare industry is still spending 40 percent of its revenue base on matching buyers and suppliers manually, using legacy systems,” says co-founder and CEO Praful Mehta. The marketplace is built on data science that connects billions of data points across the healthcare supply chain. The platform profiles suppliers and buyers while recommending various contracts, tenders, and direct purchases. To contribute to post-COVID recovery, Vamstar has won Innovate UK grants with the University of Sheffield and the University of Nottingham to help monitor supply chain risk and supply-demand matching within the country’s healthcare systems. The fresh funding will help the company grow from its offices in the UK and India, expanding across Germany and the US by the end of this year. New hires in sales and marketing, product development and data analysis will help that along.