He would not have turned out as an entrepreneur in pathology in Kenya, if he followed his first dream of becoming a college professor.
At 29, after he graduated with a master's degree in medicine pathology from the University of Nairobi, he was posted to marginalised Garissa by the government. The dire need for pathology services in Garissa changed his mind.
“I asked myself what it benefited us doctors to have all the accolades and facilities back in Nairobi, while people in places like Garissa waited for weeks just to get simple medical tests done.
"One case of leukaemia particularly broke my heart. We lost the patient a few weeks after I arrived, in a case I believe was due to a late diagnosis,” says Dr Ahmed Kalebi.
He helped establish the first proper laboratory in the then-Garissa district and left shortly after for further studies in South Africa.
“When I returned home in 2009, I had trained my focus on partnering with the government to establish a modern, fully equipped, and accessible lab, to act as a referral hub for all pathology needs.”
He was banking on the technical and professional experience he had gained and the networks he had built while studying in South Africa. Bureaucracy and lengthy processes postponed his dream for a short while.
Lancet Labs South Africa had approached him to set up a modern lab in Kenya at the tail end of his studies.
Lab technologists operating analyzers at Dr Kalebi Labs (DKL) Limited in Nairobi Upper Hill on September 18, 2024.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
“The universe conspires to support you when you have the right vision,” Dr Kalebi says.
He became the founder and a minority shareholder of Lancet Kenya that year. He worked at Lancet until 2018, when he took a three-year sabbatical from work to spend time with his family.
During his sabbatical, they had a fallout with the new majority shareholders of the parent company.
“Digital pathology is something that I have always wanted. And that was the new path I would take once I was done with the break,” he says.
Three years
Most serial entrepreneurs always fall back on what they know best, but Dr Kalebi's dilemma was to set up the business, seen as a competing business with his former employer.
As with any other business, he was under strict non-compete agreements under his contract. As a former chief executive, he was also required to take at least one year out of the business, not working for a similar entity.
Secondly, as a shareholder, he had a three-year cap to not invest in a similar business. 2021, therefore, became ideal—legally—for him to think about investment and setting up his new venture.
He has set up the new Dr Kalebi Labs (DKL) in Upperhill, Nairobi—a two-floor medical laboratory that is fully automated and meant to “democratise testing.”
The location is strategic. It is just a few metres from major hospitals and labs in the city. This would prompt the question, is he competing for the same clients as his former employer and company?
“No. I have set up a lab that offers services currently unavailable in Kenya. I am complementing services offered across the country.
"I believe firmly, in the blue-ocean strategy, I don’t go fishing where everyone has gone, I chatter new waters and find my fishing ground.” Blue ocean strategy is about doing business where there is no competitor. It is about creating new land, not dividing up existing land.
He says that clients buy value, and if he can offer that, there is no legal reason they should not get it from him, whether he has served them before or not.
“We are guided by the law and our professional code of conduct that proscribe our business ethic. The only thing I can’t do is solicit clients, but if they show up at DKL, we will serve them as we would, new clients,” he says.
You would be hard-pressed to find a single legacy microscope at the 8,000-square-foot facility.
“We are fully automated. The machines we have here, cannot be found elsewhere in the continent,” he argues, "at the moment, 50 percent of our tests are very new in the country. Making these services available to the critical mass is our competitive advantage.”
Dr Ahmed Yakub Kalebi, the founder, chairman and Principal Pathologist operates an Automated digital microscope at Dr Kalebi Labs (DKL), at the facility in Nairobi’s Upper Hill.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
To understand this transition, one has to understand the wind beneath his wings. His lifeblood.
“The three-year break gave me clarity and time to plan and chat my path and to share my vision with my wife, who is my greatest pillar. She encouraged me to go for this dream that, at the time, seemed out of reach. I had a vision that needed a life-giving force.”
After his break in 2021, he became an independent pathology consultant and a university lecturer, until mid-2023 when he shifted his focus to setting up DKL.
Two challenges
He faced two challenges at first. He did not have the money to rent out space. “I reached out to a friend in the US for a soft loan, to use as a deposit and about six months of rent,” he tells BDLife.
As this was happening, he had not acquired even a single machine. However, he had great faith in destiny. This, he believes, is his destiny, and the universe would conspire to work with him to set up his business.
The second challenge was that the space he rented was old and needed structural assessment to ascertain whether it would fall on the weight of the machines (still not acquired).
“We had to fly in a structural engineer to give us a clean bill of health. That was about four months of waiting. We had to make structural adjustments to the building to withstand the heavy machines we were about to acquire—by faith.”
His next headache was the capital. At the 2023 Medlab Conference in Dubai, he talked to Prof Akhtar Chugtai-the founder of Dr Chugthai Labs in Pakistan, who reminded him of the name he had built over the years, especially with suppliers and manufacturers of what he needed and that he could leverage that to reach an agreement with them—debt-free.
At the time, he considered taking a dollar-denominated debenture loan from a friend or a foreign investor who would issue him a convertible note.
Locally, he spoke to a friend who advised him to look for local investors instead or people who would lend him money, seeing that the exchange rate was too volatile.
“To this end, we have spent upwards of Sh500 million on software installation, training, and setting up. This does not include the cost of some of the machines we have.
"All the money has been bootstrapped from family and friends. My wife has contributed about 60 percent of the efforts to fill our collective basket,” he says.
Chicken and egg situation
Most of the machines are supplied to them on a placement agreement- where they agree with the supplier to lend them machines for some time under the condition that, DKL will source all the required reagents from the suppliers.
Inside Dr Kalebi Labs (DKL) facility in Upper Hill, Nairobi on September 18, 2024.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
At first, the suppliers needed him to show them the numbers for the agreements to make sense.
“It was a chicken and egg situation. They wanted me to guarantee them that I had the numbers. How could I when I had no business, which comes first, the numbers or the business?”
The clarity with which he explained his vision was his greatest currency during the negotiations. His reputation in the medical field was a key consideration for the investors.
“We have worked with some of the suppliers since 2009. I have built a name big enough—as Dr Chughtai told me—to sit at the table and discuss. That process taught me that in entrepreneurship, money is not the problem, the greatest gap is the deficiency of ideas.”
Dr Kalebi has a team of about 90 working across various departments. At 49, he is the oldest member of staff at DKL.
“In my journey, I have realised working with younger, fresh-from-the-university staff is much easier. They are easy to teach, and they carry great ambition, making it easy to achieve corporate goals,” he says.
His lab targets anyone and everyone who requires medical lab services.
To the budding investors in medical entrepreneurship, he says: “Go for it! We need more people to invest in medicine. There is a huge scope, and one has to be like an intentional tree planter. Look for space and plant your tree. Tend to it and see it grow.”
He has one caution, though: medical entrepreneurship is a growth in value business. It is not a quick profit-making venture. It takes time to close gaps, he says.
