Knuru Capital leads $30m financing to KLAIM to expand its capital solution to support healthcare SMEs

Venture investor firm Knuru Capital announces that it will be providing KLAIM with a $5 million seed investment into an innovative securitised financing structure to help scale its receivable purchase operations in the UAE. KLAIM is a FinTech company dedicated to healthcare that provides working capital to small and mid-size healthcare providers to ease their cash flow burden.

Through this deal, Knuru will provide an initial commitment with plans to increase this to over $30 million by way of a pool of Sharia-compliant investors. The funding will be used to support KLAIM’s medical claims receivable purchasing solution, which allows healthcare providers to quickly access working capital by selling their insurance claims that are pending payment and typically settled between 60 and 112 days.

Previously, KLAIM has announced working on an alternative Sharia-compliant fund provided by Al-Khair Capital, which is currently under regulatory approval by CMA in Saudi. The company is poised to scale its operations with further institutional debt and Series A equity financing in the very near term. This innovative financing structure led by Knuru Capital is one of the first of its kind in the UAE and a landmark expansion phase for KLAIM, which aims to bring its advanced healthcare financing solution to the rest of the region.

This capital solution is particularly targeted at small and mid-sized healthcare providers that are not served by traditional lending businesses. In the UAE alone, over 35 small and medium-sized healthcare providers have been part of KLAIM's beta programme and currently benefit from KLAIM’s advanced working capital solution. KLAIM's innovative products give these providers visibility and freedom to expand their healthcare practice and improve the quality of care they can offer, all without relying on an unpredictable claim reimbursement process that they are very dependent on today. Claims payments from insurance companies to healthcare facilities can take anywhere between 60 and 112 days, which directly affects all types of operations of the medical facility.

“This financing will allow us to scale and help many more healthcare facilities. Financial stability of healthcare providers is crucial to the quality of their healthcare delivery”, says Karim Dakki, CEO of KLAIM. “After one year since we did our first medical claim purchase transaction, we have now proven the business model and built a track record that institutional investors such as Knuru are very comfortable with. We are ready to scale with large debt facilities or fund structures. The capital provided by Knuru Capital will help us further contribute to this stability, ensuring that people in the UAE and across the GCC have access to better and diversified healthcare”.

For Knuru, this funding is an opportunity to continue to accomplish its goal of helping Fintech companies scale with access to smart capital so they can further improve the lives of their target market. In this case, Knuru is excited about the opportunity to participate in the improvement of the quality of healthcare in the GCC.

“We are proud to be partnering with KLAIM in leading digitisation of healthcare claims management and financing in the GCC”, says Alain Dib, CEO of Knuru Capital. “This combination of KLAIM’s claim management software and the capital solution will greatly help SME healthcare in managing their payments and improve cash flow management and focus on delivering excellence in healthcare services”.

The medical claim market in the UAE alone is $5.4 billion annually. It is estimated that $1-1.5 billion of providers' receivables are currently held with insurance companies that KLAIM is trying to release in the market.

As healthcare providers continue to suffer from a tedious claims payment process and inaccessible and inflexible bank lending, the superiority of medical receivables financing will continue to grow. This rising demand will be exacerbated by the growing importance of the insurance sector for health delivery and the now-established link between financial stability and the quality of healthcare.

Against this backdrop, KLAIM, together with its investment partners is in the perfect position to support healthcare providers and ensure that cash flow problems do not hold back healthcare in the GCC.

• KT Network