Health systems · Electronic medical records
Helium Health
A Lagos company that digitised hospital paperwork across West Africa, then started lending to the hospitals it had digitised. Ten years in, it has $40 million of disclosed equity, grant money from the Gates Foundation and the GSMA, and a loan book that independent reporting puts at $10.9 million.
Hospital by hospital, in a borrowed car
Three people in Lagos, none of them clinicians, typed the word hospital into Google Maps and drove to whatever came up. When they finished at one, they typed it again.
“I remember the first day, one of my co-founders, his mom lent us this car that looks like a golf cart,” Adegoke Olubusi told the podcast The Flip in 2021. The three of them would find the chief medical officer or the hospital director and make their case.
They kept at it for months, city by city. Olubusi describes the method plainly: “we started knocking on the door of every hospital we could, and we did this for a very long time, a stupidly long time.”
They were selling an electronic medical record to hospitals that had never had one. What they were after was the data underneath it.
Paper, and the absence of numbers
Olubusi frames the problem in three parts: care is still delivered on paper, so no data is captured; without data nobody can make a decision; and the market is so fragmented that almost no operator runs more than 20 or 25 locations. His own illustration is the sharpest one. When hospitals tell Helium Health their average monthly patient visits during a sales conversation, he says, the number turns out to be off by 30 to 50 percent more than two thirds of the time.
Company survey work quoted by TechCabal in 2020 put more than 57 percent of private Nigerian hospitals as never having raised money externally. The much repeated $66 billion annual African healthcare financing deficit also originates with the company and travels through the trade press unchecked.
A lawyer, a public health graduate and a bored engineer
Olubusi went to Maryland in 2014 for an advanced engineering degree at Johns Hopkins, then worked at Goldman Sachs, eBay and PayPal. “When I was at eBay and Goldman I was really bored and I wanted to do something more challenging,” he told TechCrunch. Dimeji Sofowora, the chief financial officer, is a lawyer with degrees from Leeds and Queen Mary who worked on deals at Goldman Sachs and at the Nigerian firm Aluko and Oyebode. Tito Ovia studied biomedical sciences at Manchester after twice missing a place in medical school, then worked at the Lagos State AIDS Control Agency, where she watched HIV counselling records pile up on paper.
In July 2021 Endeavor Nigeria selected all three as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, the thirteenth company from its Nigerian office to enter that network.
From records to credit to state governments
By 2020 the company had bought three other hospital management software firms, according to Olubusi, and had 300 hospitals live in Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia. In May 2020 it closed a $10 million Series A co-led by Dubai’s Global Ventures and the Japan-linked Africa Healthcare Masterfund, with Tencent, Ohara Pharmaceutical, Y Combinator and others participating. Reuters covered the round the next day.
The lending product launched that year. Hospitals on HeliumOS already produced the billing, inventory and claims data a lender would want, so Helium Health began originating collateral-free loans on behalf of banks, promising a decision inside 48 hours.
Expansion followed: Kenya in June 2021, a tripartite memorandum with the Ekiti State government and Sterling Bank the month after, and in November 2021 the purchase of Meddy, a Qatar based doctor booking platform, for an undisclosed sum, a rare deal between African and Gulf technology companies. In June 2023 came a $30 million Series B led by AXA IM Alts, with 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, Capria Ventures, Angaza Capital and Flatworld Partners joining.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Gates Foundation grant | INV-046250, committed November 2022, $499,870 over 22 months, grantee location Lekki Phase 1, Lagos. Topics listed as discovery and translational sciences and maternal, newborn, child nutrition and health. | Public record |
| GSMA grant | GSMA states it awarded a grant in November 2024 to add geospatial mapping, USSD and robocall alerts to HeliumDoc for flood-prone areas, noting the 2022 floods damaged more than 22.9 percent of health facilities. | Public record |
| Flood response deployment | Launched July 2025 in Delta and Bayelsa states with the state governments and UK FCDO support. Stated targets: 350 health workers trained and 10,000 residents reached. | Company-stated |
| Ekiti State partnership | Memorandum signed at the Ministry of Health in Ado-Ekiti, July 2021, with Sterling Bank. Helium Health’s regional growth lead said the company would put a little over 300 million naira into four secondary facilities over five years as a pilot. | Independent |
| Other government work | Statewide digitisation listed for Akwa Ibom and Ekiti, and a Lagos State COVID-19 system credited with processing more than 500,000 travellers. No procurement documents found. | Company-stated |
| Maternal health consortium | FOR M(om), led by MSD for Mothers with Helium Health, SCIDaR and AFRIDA, covering 250 public and private facilities in Delta, Lagos and Kano over three years. | Partner disclosure |
| Loan book | $3.5M across 200+ facilities (June 2023, company). $5M (July 2023, CEO to TechCabal). $10.9M across 460+ facilities in 22 states of Nigeria and Kenya, with a named borrower, Yanga Dental in Lagos (September 2025, Nigeria Health Watch). | Independent |
| DFC partnership | The 2023 release promised 1,000 lending customers by 2024 in partnership with the US International Development Finance Corporation. No DFC public information summary naming Helium Health was found. The published DFC guaranty for health sector lending in Nigeria names First City Monument Bank, $7,000,000 over nine years. | No matching record |
| Scale claims | June 2023: 1,000 facilities, more than 10,000 health workers, over 1 million patients, 150 staff in 10 countries. One month later TechCabal wrote that the same platform was used across 230 facilities. Both trace back to the company. | Figures disagree |
| Clinical or safety evidence | No FDA record, registered trial, peer-reviewed evaluation, NIH or NSF award found in the pulled record set as of September 2026. | Not found |
Read plainly: the institutional money is real and documented, the government relationships are real but disclosed on the company’s terms, and the lending business is the part with the best independent verification. The weakest link is the gap between announced targets and observed delivery. A thousand lending customers were promised for 2024; an independent account in late 2025 counted 460.
What to watch
- Whether any DFC or other development finance disclosure ever names Helium Health directly.
- The loan book trend. It grew about three times in 27 months while facility count roughly doubled, which means larger average loans rather than wider reach.
- CareCopilot, the AI documentation assistant the company says targets 1.5 million patients across 500 facilities, and whether any evaluation of it is published.
- A third equity round, or the absence of one. Nothing has been announced since June 2023.
In their words
“The biggest thing I advocate for, I’d say on the African continent, is the need for people to start making data-driven decisions.”
Adegoke Olubusi, co-founder and CEO, The Flip podcast, 2021 · Interview
“They don’t even know how many patients they see.”
Adegoke Olubusi on hospital record keeping, The Flip podcast, 2021 · Interview
“Half my family are doctors but none of them practice in Nigeria.”
Adegoke Olubusi, TechCrunch, 2020 · Independent
“We do generate revenues in millions of dollars and are profitable”
Adegoke Olubusi, TechCrunch, 2020 · Company-stated
“Some people have lived their years and built their entire careers around the paper documentation.”
Tito Ovia, co-founder, Nairametrics, 2020 · Interview
“Today sets a significant milestone for improved service delivery in our state through this public partnership that we have.”
Dr Oyebanji Filani, Ekiti Commissioner for Health, Nigerian Tribune, 2021 · Independent
“Our niche is very specific. We bring financing where it’s hardest to get from traditional banking,”
Aisha Ajidagba, Lead, Credit Operations, Nigeria Health Watch, 2025 · Company-stated
“HeliumCredit gave us the push we needed. Believe me, the disbursement was done in less than a week from the first conversation.”
Dr Ebuka Anyaeji, CEO, Yanga Dental, Nigeria Health Watch, 2025 · Customer
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordCommitted grant INV-046250 to Helium Health
- Public recordHelium Health grantee page, GSMA Innovation Fund
- Public recordPublic information summary, health sector SME lending guaranty, First City Monument Bank
- Public recordPulled record set: no FDA, trial, NIH, NSF, PubMed or SEC Form D match
- IndependentNigeria’s Helium Health raises $10M Series A for Africa expansion
- IndependentAfrican startup Helium Health closes $10 million funding round
- InterviewOur major challenge is eliminating paper, Tito Ovia of Helium Health
- InterviewDigitizing Healthcare with Helium Health’s Goke Olubusi
- IndependentEkiti govt partners Helium Health, Sterling Bank on digitisation of hospitals
- IndependentNigeria’s Helium Health acquires Qatar’s Meddy in rare Africa to GCC deal
- IndependentHelium Health gets $30M, backed by AXA IM Alts and 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki
- IndependentInside Helium Health’s innovative healthcare financing model
- IndependentHeliumCredit is financing Africa’s private clinics, one loan at a time
- PartnerFOR M(om) project description
- CompanyHelium Health secures $10 million in Series A financing round
- CompanyAnnouncing Helium Health’s $30M Series B
- CompanyHelium Health deploys HeliumDoc AI in Delta and Bayelsa states
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
