By Prudence Minayo
Flare is the brainchild of Dolkart and Maria Rabinovich. The two identified a problem and set out to solve it, creating what has today grown to become the largest provider of emergency services in Kenya.
Flare ensures that ambulances reach patients on time and boasts of over two million subscribers.
Starting out
While they operate in Kenya, they hope to expand operations to other regions in future including West Africa by the end of the year.
The two decided to found the company after discovering that it was very hard to find an ambulance when it was needed. This was despite the fact that Nairobi had more ambulances per capita compared to
London.
She told a local daily that the demand was there but there was a problem with the system.
According to her, there were patients in need of ambulances but the technology to link them was the issue. The company came up with a response system that can be compared to an Uber for ambulances.
It comprised of: mobile apps for users, a back-end platform for ambulance and a hotline. This means that the closest ambulance is dispatched immediately after the subscriber states an emergency via the call center or app.
Payment for service
They had a difficult task in identifying how subscribers would cater for costs of provided service.
“An Uber trip in Kenya would cost you around 300 Kenyan shillings or US$2.40. Ambulances are a lot more expensive and we, very early on, decided that we never wanted to ask anyone calling the service:
‘How are you going to pay today?’ That question, that friction, just could not exist,” she said in an interview with How we Made it in Africa.
They came up with a subscription plan that spreads the risk among multiple users and makes it affordable. This means that the cover is of different levels. A user can subscribe for $32 a year or a family of four for $103 per year.
At the beginning, the company would sign up only individual users. As they accessed the service and saw its usefulness, they marketed it to friends, colleagues and families making it self-marketable.
Growth
The company grew in terms of customers and the government, NGOs and corporates including Bolt started signing up their employees for the service.
Today, the company enables clients to get an ambulance in about 15 minutes unlike when they started. At the beginning, it would take up to three hours for it to arrive.
Hospitals and doctors also started making use of Flare to ease referrals and transfers between medical facilities.
Apart from ambulance services, they have added road assistance to their bundle. This means they help handle the car in case of an accident or breakdown.
