Temie Giwa-Tubosun was born in Nigeria, but at the age of 15, she moved to the United States. She came back to Nigeria for the first time following her first year of graduate school, to work as an intern with the Department for International Development at Paths2 in Abuja.
She worked as an intern with a low-income expectant mother who went through a difficult three-day labor and whose baby tragically passed away shortly after. Since then, Giwa-Tubosun has committed her life to reduce maternal mortality in Nigeria.
Giwa-Tubosun spent several more years working for agencies like the Global Health Corps and the World Health Organization until she made a permanent move back to Nigeria and got married.
She gave birth to her first child prematurely in a Minnesota hospital in February 2014; she characterized the labor and delivery as “difficult and painful.” Recognizing that she might have bled to death if she had delivered the baby in Nigeria, Giwa-Tubosun founded LifeBank in January 2016, incubating the firm at the Co-Creation Hub in Lagos.
Her company, LifeBank, has addressed the ongoing blood supply crisis in Nigeria. In a 2017 interview, she stated: “I established LifeBank because I envisioned a society where women didn’t die from avoidable reasons like postpartum hemorrhage.”
Temie Giwa-Tubosun founded LifeBank in 2016 with a simple but powerful goal in mind: to create a healthy supply chain that could deliver vital products and equipment from ports to clinics – 24/7. Now working with hospitals across Nigeria and Kenya, she manages a delivery system that includes bikes, boats, trucks, tricycles, and drones, all operating around the clock to make sure lives are not lost needlessly.
Through its app, LifeBank manages the logistics of collecting blood from blood banks and delivering it to hospitals, along with other medical supplies such as oxygen and drugs.
Growth
As of January 2017, the company has helped deliver over 2000 pints of blood to patients across the state.
Lifebank serves over 1,000 hospitals in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They have delivered over 45,400 units of critical supplies and helped save over 20,000 patients. About three-quarters of these people were from low-income communities. In Nigeria and Kenya, they have also established a network of 100 blood banks and recruited about 7,400 blood donors.
Funding
In 2018, LifeBank closed a $200,000 seed round. The round was led by EchoVC Pan-Africa fund. Angel investor Fola Laoye and CcHub Growth Capital also participated in the round.
On November 16, 2019, Temie Giwa was named the winner of Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize which held in Accra, Ghana. The win for LifeBank was worth $250,000.
In 2022, LifeBank was among the 60 African startups selected for Google for Startups Black Founders Fund (BFF).
