Health insurance and care delivery · Nigeria, Egypt, Senegal
Reliance Health
A Lagos health maintenance organisation selling flat fee plans with its own clinics and telemedicine. It raised the largest Series B in African health tech, then cut 106 jobs in July 2025 chasing breakeven.
Two weeks to demo day
In week six of Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch, Femi Kuti went into office hours expecting tactical advice. His company, Kangpe, was a Nigerian telemedicine app that put a doctor in a chat window. Demo day was fourteen days out.
The group partner asked something else.
“Guys. Is this really fulfilling the mission that you had set out to do?”
Kuti had to concede it was not. A patient told in a chat to get an x-ray still had to find a radiology centre, pay for it, and come back. The business that closed that loop looked less like an app and more like Kaiser Permanente: a fixed fee, a licence, a hospital network, clinics of its own.
“Two weeks to demo day, we’re supposed to be on a stage pitching our business to tons of Silicon Valley investors,” he recalled.
They rewrote the pitch and presented a company they had worked on for a week. “It absolutely did not land.”
Nine years later that unlanded pitch is an accredited Nigerian HMO in three countries, with $48 million raised and a layoff that spared only product and technology.
The problem it is aimed at
Almost nobody in Nigeria has health insurance. The Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare put coverage at 21.7 million people in 2025, up from 19.2 million a year earlier, roughly 13 percent of the population. The National Health Insurance Act of 2022 made cover mandatory, and in 2024 President Bola Tinubu ordered every ministry and agency to enrol its staff. Mandating cover and supplying it are different problems.
Supply is thin. The 2025 review Kuti co-authored puts the ratio of cardiologists to population in Nigeria at one to about 475,000 people.
Then the arithmetic that eventually bit. A corporate plan reprices once a year. Hospital fees and drug prices do not. Nigerian premiums rose between 8 and 59 percent from 2024 to 2025 depending on tier, per the same report. An insurer that guesses low on utilisation carries the difference for twelve months.
A banker, an operator and an engineer
Kuti trained as a physician, then worked as a healthcare investment banker at Goldman Sachs covering healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical corporations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, per the company. He grew up in Ondo City, the child of a physician and a teacher.
He built Kangpe with Opeyemi Olumekun and Matthew Mayaki in 2015. Mayaki, a software engineer, runs product and engineering. Olumekun sits on the board of the Delaware parent with Kuti, per both SEC filings. Mayaki does not.
From pitch to payroll
A $2 million seed landed months after YC in 2017. By mid 2018 Reliance was selling employer plans bundling telemedicine, a hospital network, prescription delivery and its own Reliance Family Clinics under one premium. Partech led a $6 million Series A in January 2020.
Then February 7, 2022: $40 million led by General Atlantic, the largest Series B in African health tech at the time and the firm’s first technology investment on the continent, with Tencent Exploration, Picus Capital, Partech, AAIC, P1 Ventures, Laerdal Million Lives Fund and M3 alongside. The announced plan was clinics in Abuja and Port Harcourt and two or three new countries inside the year.
Cairo opened late in 2022 and Senegal followed. The Egyptian business returned softer sales than expected, former employees told the Lagos newsletter Notadeepdive.
On July 15, 2025, a national holiday mourning former President Muhammadu Buhari, managers were pulled into a meeting and handed scripts. “Start the meeting calmly,” one read. By the end of that week 106 people across support, sales, marketing and operations were gone.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Nigerian licence | Reliance HMO Limited is entry 62 of 94 on the National Health Insurance Authority list of accredited HMOs, ID 92, Gbagada, Lagos. Accreditation is permission to sell, not evidence of outcomes. | Public record |
| SEC Form D | Two, both lodged February 8, 2022 by Reliance Health Inc. of Austin, Texas: $8,267,390 from 33 investors, first sale March 11, 2020, and $40,000,008 from 9 investors, first sale January 25, 2022. Nothing since. | Public record |
| US clinical records | No 510(k), no PMA, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award, all expected for this model. | Not applicable |
| Literature | One hit. A June 2025 review in npj Cardiovascular Health, co-authored by Kuti, cites Reliance as a platform providing “telemedicine services, in-person primary care, and health plans in Nigeria.” Its competing interests note reads: “Dr. Kuti is the founder and chief executive officer of Reliance Health.” It reports no outcome data. | Public record |
| Scale | 1,200 corporate clients and 150,000 members by 2021; over 2,000 Nigerian partner hospitals; 3,800 or more partners globally; 200,000 individuals and 600 businesses at the Series B. None audited or filed. | Company-stated |
| July 2025 layoffs | 106 people cut in the week of July 15, 2025. One month of salary for staff who met expectations, nothing for those who did not. Reported by Notadeepdive from internal documents and three sources. The company did not respond to emails. | Independent |
| Senegal date | Notadeepdive and Nairametrics date the entry to 2024; the company’s Senegal page says 2025; its Nigerian plans page still says coverage is Nigeria and Egypt only. | Claims disagree |
| Service quality | In April 2026 the Foundation for Investigative Journalism published a complaint from a Lagos firm that paid N350,000 for five staff in July 2025 and says a registration error left the plan unusable for nine months. | Independent |
Read plainly: the licence is real, the capital is documented to the dollar, and the operating scale is entirely company-stated and four years stale. The only independently sourced operating news since the Series B is a layoff.
What to watch
- Whether breakeven arrived. The cuts targeted the quarter then in progress, and nothing has been published about the result.
- A third Form D. None since February 2022.
- Egypt and Senegal, both opened with Series B money. Only Nigeria has been called the revenue engine.
- Updated member and client counts, last given publicly in early 2022.
- NHIA enforcement, as the regulator tightens HMO rules.
In their words
“Our mission is super simple. I mean, the definition is simple, but the execution is sometimes more difficult than that.”
Femi Kuti, CEO and co-founder, to TechCrunch, 2022 · Independent
“if you look broadly at the Nigerian healthcare system, we’re not there yet. We still have our challenges, but there has been significant improvement over the last 10 years.”
Femi Kuti, Arise News interview reported by LEADERSHIP, 2024 · Independent
“This decision is part of a company-wide workforce reduction aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability of the business and supporting our immediate goal of achieving breakeven this quarter.”
Managers to affected staff, from internal documents, Notadeepdive, 2025 · Independent
“Literally everyone I know was laid off.”
Former Reliance Health employee, Notadeepdive, 2025 · Independent
“Despite our repeated efforts to rectify what was clearly a minor registration error, the matter remains unresolved.”
Nwogu Scholastica Ihunanyachi, Vibetools Media Solutions, to FIJ, 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNHIA Accredited Health Maintenance Organizations, entry 62, HMO ID 92
- Public recordTwo Form D filings, Reliance Health Inc., CIK 0001908845
- Public recordEvaluating the digital health technology landscape in sub-Saharan Africa
- Public recordHealth insurance coverage in Nigeria rises to 21.7m in 2025
- IndependentYC-backed Reliance Health lays off 100+ people in breakeven push
- IndependentCondia Insider: Why African healthtech is struggling
- IndependentReg Error Denies Client Access to N350,000 Insurance Plan for 9 Months
- IndependentNigerian healthtech startup Reliance Health raises $40M
- InterviewFemi Kuti of Reliance Health: Are You Fulfilling Your Mission?
- IndependentDigital Health Solutions Will Shape Future Of Healthcare In Nigeria, on the Arise News interview
- CompanyReliance Health raises $40M in Series B led by General Atlantic
- CompanyGlobal site, clinical services page and Senegal timeline
- CompanyReliance Health company page, Winter 2017 batch
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
