e.Bricks Ventures and Vox Capital made an undisclosed Series A investment in Sanar, a Brazilian edtech startup designing customized online training for careers in healthcare.
(Press Release) With its Series A round, Sanar aims to improve Brazilian healthcare conditions by offering better training and career options to healthcare professionals all over the country.
Brazil is a country of continental dimensions, with an unfair distribution of physicians throughout its regions. Healthcare professionals tend to stay in main cities, where there is greater concentration of universities and career opportunities. Despite the federal government programs to increase the number of med schools and universities in the countryside, due to their location they usually lack infrastructure or access to good teachers and professors.
In this scenario, four entrepreneurs with different backgrounds founded Sanar in Salvador/BA in 2013. With doctors and business people, the group realized that organizing end-to-end content with a good student experience was key to success. So, they started building different career paths for healthcare professionals with agile and efficient course structure made by experts in their sectors. “Different from the traditional publishers, Sanar listens its client’s pains and maps their career opportunities to decide which content to design, taking care of the whole book/course production”, says Ubiraci Mercês, CEO of Sanar.
With their mission to transform the healthcare services promoting knowledge and connecting dreams, Sanar business model is based on books and online courses design, curatorship and distribution for different specialties of healthcare professions: nurses, nutritionists, psychologists, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, physiotherapists and physicians.
Due to their unique way of tracking student interests and designing affordable content, the company has already sold over 60 different books and 76 different online courses to more than 60,000 students spread among 3,500 different cities in Brazil.
It was this kind of traction and the potential to improve the wellbeing and health standards of Brazilian low income patients that grasped the attention of Vox Capital, who led the round: “By combining education and healthcare strategies – two of our investment thesis focus – Sanar can offer better training to several kinds of professionals of the sector, increasing the access to healthcare services, specially in neglected areas that are distant from big urban centers” says Daniel Izzo, CEO of Vox Capital.
The undisclosed investment was closed in March this year, with the co-investment of e.Bricks Ventures, a Brazilian VC that focuses on business models that, through technology, address inefficiencies in different market segments. “We saw at Sanar a killing combination: a clear value proposition, the use of technology to deliver efficiency and good user experience, a market that was still lagging on digitalization and a team that dream big but don’t loose focus on execution”, points Pedro Sirotsky Melzer, Managing Partner of e.Bricks Ventures.