The ten finalists for the US$1.5 million 2025 competition have been revealed by Alibaba Philanthropy’s main philanthropic program, Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH). The Jack Ma Foundation’s principal African philanthropy endeavor is Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH). It helps forward-thinking businesspeople in all 54 African nations who are creating sustainable and inclusive economies. ABH will identify 100...
From tinkering with electric circuits as a child to working on the iconic Lion Ozumba 551 electric vehicle project at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Chukwuemeka Eze has always been driven by curiosity and innovation. His journey into electric mobility has now given birth to Revive Earth, a startup that is reimagining how Africa can...
For many, the daily commute is a frustrating prelude to the workday. For Efe Richard, it was a breaking point that sparked a revolution. After enduring the immense stress, unpredictable costs, and lost hours of navigating Lagos traffic for his 9-5 job, he recognized a critical disconnect between organizations and their employees’ well-being. This personal...
Growing up on a family farm after the loss of his father, the founder of Farmstarck learned firsthand the backbreaking work and deep-rooted challenges facing African farmers. For over 15 years, he worked alongside his mother, witnessing the potential of agriculture stifled by limited market access, exploitative middlemen, and a glaring lack of financial inclusion....
For many, learning to code is a daunting, solitary journey. But for Enoch Osadebamewn Eholor, a developer who started coding at just 13 years old, that isolation revealed a critical gap in tech education. While studying in university, he began teaching tech skills to his roommates, and a powerful idea took root: What if learning...
Circle Ventures, the investment arm of USDC stablecoin issuer Circle, has invested in the USD 20 M African Blockchain Fund run by CV VC (Crypto Valley Venture Capital), marking a pivotal bet on Africa’s growing stablecoin-driven digital asset ecosystem.
The Cayman-Islands–domiciled fund focuses on early-stage African startups using blockchain for fintech, payments, and data infrastructure. This shift towards infrastructure investment follows a wave of crypto exchange shutdowns across the continent, as capital now flows to startups tackling structural issues like currency volatility, cross-border payment friction, and financial exclusion.
Launched in 2022 by CV VC Africa Managing Partner Gideon Greaves, the African Blockchain Fund has previously backed ventures in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Circle’s participation signals growing confidence from global players that Africa’s digital asset future will be built on stablecoin-powered utility rather than speculative trading.
This comes as stablecoins now account for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Chainalysis, with Nigerians receiving UD 24 B in stablecoins in 2024 alone; the second highest globally.
Gregory Rockson, founder and chief executive of Ghanaian health technology firm mPharma, is stepping down after 11 years, the founder has revealed. He will transition to the role of Chairman of the board, while Chief Operating Officer Kwesi Arhin will be promoted to CEO, effective Sept. 1, 2025.
The leadership change at one of Africa’s most prominent healthtech startups follows a period of significant restructuring, including a major round of layoffs and a strategic shift toward operational efficiency and new markets.
Arhin, who joined mPharma in 2021 and most recently served as COO, will take the helm. His background in finance and global consulting is seen as aligning with the company’s renewed focus on a disciplined growth model.
The move is a common transition for venture-backed startups, where founders move to a strategic board role as the company matures.
The CEO change caps a volatile period for the company. In September 2023, mPharma laid off approximately 150 employees, which Rockson at the time linked to macroeconomic challenges and a severe devaluation of Nigeria’s currency.
Months later, in January 2024, the company secured USD 13.6 M in new funding from investors, including the Sanofi Global Health Unit Impact Fund.
That capital has supported a strategic pivot, including a recent push into Francophone Africa, where the company reported an annualised revenue run rate of USD 1.5 M within seven months.
Founded in 2014, mPharma manages a network of pharmacies and clinics to improve access to affordable medicine. It has raised over USD 65 M to date and operates in several African countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya.
Swyft, a Cameroon-based logistics tech startup, has received a pre-seed investment from the University of Michigan International Investment Fund (IIF) to scale its B2B and B2C delivery services across Africa.
Founded in 2019, the IIF backs SMEs in emerging markets. Swyft, which specializes in first-to-last mile logistics, will use the funding to expand operations and enhance its tech platform.
“This partnership validates our mission to modernize African logistics,â€Â said Franck Batchadji, Swyft’s CEO. The IIF praised Swyft’s potential to transform delivery services in Cameroon and beyond.
Cape Town venture capital firm HAVAÃC has secured USD 25 M toward its USD 50 M African Innovation Fund 3, with major backing from financial services group Sanlam Multi-Manager. The fund targets 15 early-stage African tech startups with global potential, focusing on fintech, agritech and other high-growth sectors.
The investment marks Sanlam’s first significant move into South Africa’s VC space, joining existing backers Fireball Capital and the SA SME Fund. HAVAÃC has already deployed capital from the fund, including USD 1 M investments in SAPay (digitising taxi payments) and sports analytics platform Sportable. These join earlier 2025 investments in pan-African payments platform NjiaPay and livestock trading platform SwiftVEE.
The announcement follows several successful exits from HAVAÃC’s portfolio, most notably emergency response tech firm RapidDeploy’s acquisition by Motorola Solutions; one of South Africa’s largest tech exits. Another portfolio company, hearX Group, recently merged with hearing tech firm Eargo in a USD 100 M deal.
With its current portfolio already serving 22 million customers across 183 countries, HAVAÃC is positioning itself as a key player in Africa’s growing VC landscape. The firm plans to continue identifying and supporting African tech entrepreneurs building scalable solutions, with particular interest in businesses that can expand across multiple African markets and beyond. The remaining USD 25 M of the fund is expected to be raised in the coming months.
Egypt’s Elmenus, an online food discovery platform, has appointed Walid El-Saadany as its new chief executive officer, replacing founder Amir Allam after more than a decade leading the company.
The announcement marks a leadership handover at a time when the food-tech platform is planning to expand across more cities and invest in new digital infrastructure.
El-Saadany, who will also join the board of directors, is expected to guide the company through a new phase focused on scaling operations, integrating artificial intelligence, and building closer relationships with restaurant partners.
He takes over from Amir Allam, who founded Elmenus in 2011 with USD 5 K and a small team, and built it into one of the country’s best-known platforms for food discovery and delivery. Allam will remain on the board and stay involved in the company’s strategic direction.
Allam, reflecting on the transition, said he felt the timing was right to step back from day-to-day leadership. “What began with a laptop and two people has become a household brand that has impacted millions of users, created jobs for tens of thousands,†he said. “It is now the right time to pass the baton as the company enters a new phase.â€
The company says Elmenus now reaches over 8.5 million users annually and works with more than 12,000 restaurants across four cities, with 1,000 of those currently offering online ordering. It has raised USD 30 M in funding from regional and global investors, including Careem and Global Ventures.
El-Saadany enters the role with nearly two decades of experience in tech, logistics, and venture-backed startups. He previously led Otlob through two key acquisitions, first by Foodpanda and later by Delivery Hero, which eventually rebranded the platform as Talabat. His background is seen as a key asset as Elmenus looks to strengthen its operational structure and broaden its market reach.
At Elmenus, he is expected to focus on expanding the platform’s presence beyond Cairo, Alexandria, and Giza into underserved cities and towns, where Elmenus plans to onboard more than 4,000 new restaurants in the coming period.
As part of the strategy, Elmenus plans to roll out AI-driven features aimed at improving restaurant discovery, delivery times, and offering more personalised recommendations to users. These changes are aimed at increasing efficiency while helping restaurant partners manage operations, pricing, and customer engagement more effectively.
Part of the company’s roadmap also includes investment in local talent development and workforce training, with initiatives that include upskilling riders and developers, as well as supporting small restaurant operators and women-led kitchens.
The leadership shift comes as Egypt’s food delivery and digital payments markets continue to grow, driven by rising smartphone adoption, fintech expansion, and increased demand for convenience and local service. Elmenus is positioning itself to benefit from those trends by enhancing both its consumer experience and its back-end tools for restaurants.
El-Saadany is expected to focus on execution and scale, with an eye toward long-term stability in a competitive and fast-moving market.
Dakar-based healthtech startup Eyone Medical has raised USD 3 M from Oyass Capital, a new Senegalese government-backed private equity fund focused on scaling high-impact SMEs. The deal was announced at Oyass’s launch event, marking one of its first investments.
Founded in 2015 by Henri Ousmane Gueye and John Diatta, Eyone provides interoperable digital health systems, including its flagship Shared Patient Record platform, which enables clinics and hospitals to securely share and manage patient data.
The platform is used in over 60 healthcare institutions across Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Gabon, and France.
The new funding will help Eyone, which previously raised USD 1 M and secured another USD 300 K in prize money, integrate AI into its systems, enhance infrastructure, and expand across Francophone West Africa, where fragmented health records and inefficiencies remain major challenges.
The deal also reflects a growing trend of public-private co-investment in strategic sectors like healthtech, with governments like Senegal’s taking a more active role in startup funding.
A record-breaking year for participation and regional representation, Alibaba Philanthropy’s flagship philanthropic initiative, Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH), has revealed the top 50 finalists for its US$1.5 million 2025 competition. The Jack Ma Foundation’s principal African philanthropy endeavor is Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH). It helps forward-thinking businesspeople in all 54 African nations who are creating sustainable...
Applications for catalytic funding ranging from €100,000 to €250,000 are being accepted by African-led innovation consortia under the Joint Innovation Facility’s (JIF) Expression of Interest Call. Through funding, coaching, assistance with investment preparation, and awareness, the JIF promotes initiatives in cutting-edge fields like Blue Tech, Energy, Smart Mobility, and Smart Cities. Eligibility Criteria: To be...
Are you an aspiring business owner or software engineer from West Africa prepared to establish a significant AI startup? Applications for the MEST AI Startup Program 2026 are currently being accepted! A chosen group of innovators will graduate from this 12-month, completely immersive program with the technical know-how, commercial acumen, and mentoring required to launch...
The globally oriented TractionBoost Accelerator, which helps early-stage firms prepare for pre-seed fundraising, is open to African startups. For early-stage entrepreneurs, the TractionBoost Accelerator is a two-month intense program that focuses on client acquisition and product testing. Its objective is to provide founders the momentum they need to obtain pre-seed capital. Through a structured accelerator...
Applications are now being accepted for the fifth iteration of Visa’s biennial Africa Fintech Accelerator, which gives businesses access to resources, industry contacts, and mentorship to help them develop their creative solutions. Visa is a global payment card network. The Africa Fintech Accelerator, which started in 2023 in accordance with Visa’s commitment to invest US$1...
Apply now for the RevUp Women Initiative: Nigeria Edition, an enterprise development program from AfriLabs that aims to boost early-stage, female-led companies in the agribusiness and e-commerce industries by providing them with specialized assistance, capacity building, and access to a vibrant pan-African innovation ecosystem. Requirements E-commerce businesses are defined as companies that sell physical or...
The 2025 “Skills for Business†initiative was started by UpSkill Universe in collaboration with Google and HP Inc. to equip 10,000 SMEs in South Africa and Nigeria with the digital and business skills they need to thrive and survive. By the end of 2025, the program is expected to directly teach 10,000 SMEs and indirectly...
You can order hot jollof on Chowdeck and have it at your door before the steam fades. You can order fresh tomatoes on GoLemon without stepping outside. But if your mother needs hypertension medication at 5 p.m. in Bayelsa?Â
That question—why the convenience economy stopped short of healthcare—haunted Abimbola Adebakin. A pharmacist with years of experience in organisational strategy and consulting, she’d spent her career building systems behind the scenes. One day, trying and failing to help a family friend find a basic drug after visiting nine pharmacies, she was jolted into a personal embarrassment that refused to let go.
So she built a solution. In 2017, Adebakin launched Advantage Health Africa (AHA) to make accessing quality, affordable medication as seamless as ordering dinner. Through its flagship platform, MyMedicines, AHA delivers prescriptions across Nigeria—even to remote areas—while supplying clinics and pharmacies through a growing B2B distribution network. Today, the company serves over 30 HMOs, moves thousands of orders monthly, and powers an increasingly digitised ecosystem through its proprietary inventory visibility platform, The Advantage.
The road to relevance was anything but linear. Failed products. Broken tech. Layoffs. A near-collapse of their pharmacy network. On today’s edition of Day 1 to 1000, AHA’s founder and CEO, Abimbola Adebakin, walks me through how she built a healthtech company out of frustration, scaled it through a pandemic, and learned when to pivot, when to let go, and when to keep the faith.
This is the story of Advantage Health Africa, as told to TechCabal.
Day 1-1000: From consulting gigs to a tech-enabled pharmacy network
Advantage Health Africa didn’t start with a grand strategy. It started with shame.
A family friend needed a drug. I offered to help. I’m a pharmacist—how hard could it be? I went to a pharmacy. They didn’t have it. I went to another. And another. I visited nine pharmacies across Lagos that day and still came up empty-handed. I was embarrassed. What kind of system was this? What kind of pharmacist was I if I couldn’t find a basic drug?
That moment stayed with me. It opened my eyes to something we all quietly endure: a broken distribution system that forces sick people to wander from pharmacy to pharmacy, hoping to get lucky. I thought: we can’t keep working around this. We have to fix it.
When I started Advantage Health Africa in 2017, we launched with services: consulting, training, anything to keep the lights on while we figured out the bigger thing. We built relationships. We worked with pharmacy associations and regulators. We mapped the territory.
Nine months later, on October 1st, we launched MyMedicines, a direct-to-consumer service that lets people order drugs and get them delivered. That first year, the traction was slow but steady. Then COVID hit.
Suddenly, what we were offering wasn’t a convenience, it was essential. People couldn’t leave their homes. Clinics wouldn’t take non-critical patients. HMOs that previously ignored us came running. “Can your pharmacies deliver?†they asked. “Yes,†we said, because we could.
Revenue jumped 10x. Word of mouth exploded. People abroad were ordering drugs for their parents in Bayelsa, Onitsha, places we could reach in 24 hours. CNN called. The world noticed. And we knew: we’d hit product-market fit.
We pivoted, failed, restructured, and kept going
Before COVID, we’d also tried building a pharmacy franchise called MyPharmacy. But the timing was off. The tech was shaky. COVID made everything harder. We raised some money for it, but within 12 months, we shut it down. Still, the name stuck. People began to refer to us as “MyPharmacy†even after it was gone. And we kept the spirit of the network alive, just not in the format we started with.
That was hard. Letting go of the vision—and letting go of people. But we did it properly. We flew in our field staff, sat them down, and paid two months’ salary. Helped them reposition. Some of them came back later when we were ready to rebuild.
We also tried wholesaling to pharmacies but quickly realised that wasn’t scalable. The margins were brutal. The scale wasn’t there. It was our board that pushed me to switch to selective distribution. They were right. That arm took off once we brought in a seasoned MD with experience in sales and marketing. I had to admit what I didn’t know and hire someone for it. Our branded generics—DHA Plus, Relsid Plus, and others—are now thriving in the market.
I come from an organisational development background. Even in chaos, I knew we needed structure: operating models, culture, systems. We got ISO-certified early on. We let people go when we had to, humanely, and hired back some of them later.
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Day 1000-Present day
We failed twice at building our core tech, then finally cracked it. We tried to build the tech backend—what we now call The Advantage—three times.
In 2018, we partnered with a team from Cape Verde who promised to help after we were selected among Africa’s top 50 startups. It didn’t work. In 2021, we tried again: it was another flop. Finally, we built internal capabilities, paired them with an external developer, and launched a working system in late 2023. Now it powers real-time inventory visibility across pharmacies. It’s the infrastructure we always needed, and we own it.
Today, AHA runs two interlinked businesses:
1. Direct to consumer through MyMedicines, with services like subscriptions, “buy now, pay later,†and doorstep delivery.
2. Business-to-business distribution, supplying select, in-demand drugs to pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals nationwide.
They feed into each other. A prescription generated by an eldercare startup? We fulfill it. A woman in Lagos placing an urgent nighttime order for her visiting brother? We’ve got it covered. One of my favorite memories is delivering meds at 11 pm to a hotel in Ikeja. The customer was stunned that it was even possible in Nigeria.
What I wish I knew earlier and what’s next
I wish we had secured seed funding earlier. It would’ve saved us years of technical debt. But we made do. In 2019–2020, we raised about ₦300 million (~$1M at the time) in naira from angel investors. Since then, we’ve mostly run on cash flow and strategic debt.
There were hard times. There were nights I took on consulting jobs just to cover payroll. One of my staff was working full-time while doing construction gigs to survive. Today, he’s a manager, winning awards, and flying abroad. That grit and belief in the mission got us through.
One of my most euphoric moments in this business was in 2021, when Bayer Foundation selected us for their Women Empowerment Program. It was the pat on the back we desperately needed. After that came Google, the Nigerian Healthcare Excellence Award, and others. We started to believe again.
Honestly, I wanted to quit many times. I got offers to lead global foundations, even drone delivery startups expanding into West Africa. Since I started AHA, I haven’t earned the kind of salary I earned during my Accenture career. And these companies were offering tempting salaries and steady jobs. But I kept thinking of the scripture that says, “If you’re faithful in another man’s business, God will give you your own.†That promise anchored me.
We’re looking to integrate our services more tightly: create clearer synergies between the B2B and DTC arms. And we’re open to joining a larger ecosystem,a healthtech group where our infrastructure becomes the backbone.
What we’re building is bigger than logistics. Bigger than tech. We’re proving that in Africa, quality health access can reach the last mile and the last metre.
Mark your calendars! Moonshot by TechCabal 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.techcabal.com
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