Ayodeji Alaran is the founder and CEO of PBR Life Sciences, a healthtech company working to fix Africa’s healthcare data problem. After years of seeing drug oversupply, expiry, and waste across the continent, he launched PBR to help pharmaceutical companies make better decisions using clean, anonymised data from pharmacies.
Before PBR, Ayodeji built a 16-year career across global pharmaceutical and health data giants like Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, IQVIA, and Cegedim, before moving on to launch PBR in 2022.
Backed by Techstars, PBR has raised $1 million across one publicly disclosed funding round (pre-seed). The startup is also spread across different markets, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the UK (headquartered).
With a team spread across multiple markets, Ayodeji is leading a product that helps life sciences firms reduce drug waste, forecast better, and plan smarter. He holds a pharmacy degree from the University of Lagos, an MBA from London Business School, and executive training in marketing and pharmaceuticals.
Explain your job to a five-year-old.
Think about a big and messy pile of LEGOs and imagine building a cool spaceship. My company is like that for medicine. Companies that make medicines need information, but these are like a billion billion LEGOs all mixed up—but if we arrange this properly, it will help us know which medicines people need and how much of these should be made in the factory.
My job is to lead a team that has a super-smart brain and a robot called AI.
- We feed the robot called AI all that scattered LEGO..
- The robot arranges all the LEGOs super fast, and it says, “Aha! I found a secret pattern! This tiny piece is the key to stopping the sickness!”
- We tell the companies that make the medicine and their scientists what we found, so they know exactly which “LEGO pieces” to use to build the new medicine.
So, I don’t build the medicine myself. I’m the boss of the team that finds the secret instructions hidden in all the information. We help the companies that build medicines build the right medicine, faster.
What problem in healthcare data for Africa drives you every single morning to build PBR Life Sciences?
A pharmaceutical company in Lagos once told us they destroyed medicines that had expired in their inventory worth $700,000 and had to pay the regulatory agency before they could destroy them. This is one company out of thousands in Africa that experiences the same challenge. And what is the root cause? Lack of data to understand disease and treatment patterns, and to effectively identify and quantify which medicines to import or manufacture. Annually, the industry loses more than $10.2 billion in Africa to expiry and missed opportunities.
Even more disturbing is that as the global pharmaceutical industry accelerates towards the use of big data in healthcare for training AI tools now being deployed in drug discovery, these tools exclude African patients. By the year 2100, 8 out of every 10 people in the world will reside in Africa and Asia, yet these are the ones not being included in AI-driven drug discovery and innovation simply because quality data on their disease and treatment patterns for AI training are not available.
You’ve worked with global pharma giants. What made you decide to leave that world and start your own company?
In my roles within global teams responsible for Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, it was a daily painful experience seeing how data is driving innovation and unlocking value for patients in Europe, yet most of the emerging markets (Africa, Asia, and the Middle East) are rarely included. It almost began to feel like the value of a patient’s life is not the same everywhere, and the main driver of this inequality stems from a lack of quality data to power these innovations for an inclusive and equitable healthcare. I could not take it anymore and decided to dive in to do my part so that generations to come do not ask us what we were doing whilst the rest of the world advanced.
PBR helps reduce drug wastage and improve forecasting. What’s one story from the field that stuck with you?
A pharmaceutical company once had a challenge of how to respond to increasing inflation and cost of doing business, eroding profitability due to forex pressures, and how it should price its products in such a way that imported quantities are not so much that they expire or too little that it is not enough.
To help with this challenge, we made use of our data to assess the price elasticity of demand for up to 30 of its products (drugs used for treatment of hypertension, diabetes, infections, etc), to assess how patient purchase of medicines changes as prices change, and to enable the company to run models on the effective price point. This was also mapped with trends of diseases and doctors’ treatment choices, and also profit margins made by pharmacies when these medicines are sold to patients, a major reason why pharmacies stock their medicines.
After this exercise, the company was able to arrive at the optimised prices for its products and quantities needed whilst also achieving significant revenue growth and product uptake by patients.
The experience further reinforced how big data mined for value-adding insight can transform healthcare and deliver value to patients and all stakeholders.
What was the toughest part of building your data platform, and how did you solve it?
The toughest part is cleaning unstructured healthcare data at scale. There are no standardized healthcare database dictionaries or AI models available in Africa as reference points for data transformation. For example, the 10,000+ brands of drugs and 480,000+ drug molecules in Nigeria (at the time we started) are not classified in line with the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s standard for drug classification. These are minimum data standards for the use of drug data in research and analysis.
When we started standardizing these unstructured data sets, it took us an average of 8-10 months to clean, even as new unstructured databases are available every 3 months. The cycle of manual work was no longer sustainable.
Therefore, we had to build our AI models and infrastructure trained with initial datasets, and now we can clean new databases within 30 minutes rather than 8-10 months, and this meets global standards for data quality for research.
Which expansion into a new country challenged you the most, and what did you learn?
Kenya has been the most challenging. As we already anticipated based on our experience from working in multi-country roles, individual countries in Africa are unique and may require localization in the go-to-market strategy. The cultural nuances, regulatory differences, and industry needs all require unique approaches. However, following our successful expansion into Ghana and now identifying some common traits with Kenya, we have successfully proven how we can scale our business model across multiple countries while keeping the fundamentals of the business.
Why are you the right person to lead Africa into better healthcare decisions through data?
I am a pharmacist with more than 18 years of experience working across different segments of life sciences, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer healthcare, big data, AI, and contract research across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the UK. I have felt the pain that companies go through both at the local and global levels, in customer-facing and strategic leadership roles. I have not seen it all, but I have seen a lot. My experience in marketing, sales, leadership, analytics, business management, and entrepreneurship has all prepared me to contribute my part in shaping Africa and the rest of emerging markets to be future-ready and competitive to play in the new world of healthcare and life sciences shaped by AI and new technologies powered by data.
How do you balance running a fast-growing startup across multiple countries while staying focused?
I have learnt how to quiet the noise and focus on the most important thing at every time. My core job is leading, inspiring, and empowering our people to ensure that they not only do their best job but also find it fulfilling. Every other thing rides on that. That is my core.
What’s one tool, habit, or process that helps you work smarter every day?
Writing down my to-do list daily and assessing how well I have executed it daily. Progress is the accumulation of daily actions, ones that are well-prioritised and well-thought-out. I don’t do many things. I only do the things that matter for my role, while rigorously delegating what needs to be done.
Outside of work, what brings you joy or keeps you grounded?
My faith as a Christian, spending time with my family, and playing the piano.
Ayodeji Alaran is a confirmed speaker at ’s Moonshot, happening on October 15–16, 2025. Connect with Alaran at Moonshot. Get your tickets.
Mark your calendars! Moonshot by is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot..com
