In Africa, the healthcare system is in tatters. Emergency response is slow, inaccessible, and inconsistent, and seeing a doctor is often a last resort, when the illness becomes unbearable. This is the world Roddiyyat Taiwo wants to change using an AI doctor.
Taiwo is the co-founder of OpenHealth, a young Nigerian healthtech startup trying to make preventive healthcare accessible to young Africans. It’s a digital triage and AI-powered symptom-checking tool, built by a team of five teenagers who believe technology can bridge the healthcare gap for the continent’s underserved populations.
Taiwo joins the call from her home in Abuja, Nigeria where she currently works as a business analyst for Cedar Crest, one of the city’s largest hospital chains.
“Due to the nature of my work, I sit on so much data,” she said. “So I’m seeing in real-time how people access healthcare and where we are failing.”
Taiwo’s dream is to digitise preventive healthcare by building what she calls an “AI doctor.” OpenHealth will accurately diagnose early symptoms after collecting data and interacting with the user. Afterward, the AI doctor recommends a next step which can include a visit to a human doctor, booking a lab test, or consulting with other appropriate care providers.
Right now, OpenHealth currently lacks the existing partnerships with care providers to make this a full end-to-end product. The product stops at simply being a health concierge.
Breakaway wins
The solution is not new; telemedicine startups are getting funded across Africa, and Taiwo, who sees the problem she’s solving as continent-wide, is acutely aware of this competition. Yet, she says her team has built something that is valuable to big healthcare providers, hospital chains, and individual users.
With AbdulQuduus Ajibade, her co-founder, helming the technical side, OpenHealth can provide its technology as a subscription service, integrating with established healthtech platforms that don’t want to build an AI-enabled telemedicine service from scratch. The users’ health data is another useful asset as OpenHealth can benefit from revenue partnerships with healthcare firms on users it recommends after triage.
The startup has previously partnered with Nigerian healthcare company, mDaaS Global, to integrate its application programming interface (API) into Beacon Health, a telemedicine service operated by mDaaS, in a three-month paid pilot.
Barely two years old since ideation—one year since the product first went to market—OpenHealth has already shown promise in multiple ways. The startup has just over 1,000 people on its minimum viable product (MVP) waitlist, and operates on revenue generated from pilot tests alongside a modest $1,000 grant.
But what’s most remarkable is how the team has made a name for itself through consistent participation in startup competitions.
Alongside Ajibade, Taiwo has taken OpenHealth from a prototype to a growing product by tapping into incubators, pitch grants, and hackathons, where they’ve sold their OpenHealth dream in at least six competitions.
“We got into Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow based on a recommendation. And even though I couldn’t travel to the US because my visa was denied, we still ended up being one of the top four finalists,” she says. “It was painful, but still a win.”
Today, OpenHealth’s cap table is already taking shape. Taiwo and Ajibade retain major ownership of the business. Ten percent is allocated to early employees—each receiving 1.5% stock vested over five years—while another 10% goes to members of its advisory board, all of whom joined through the incubator programmes they’ve passed through.
“A lot of our advisors started as mentors in accelerators and now have shares,” Taiwo explains. “We’re building this in public, and with the right kind of people.”
Still, traction remains the real currency. “The grants and pitch competitions help you start,” Taiwo says. “But to keep going, you need real users, real partnerships, and a system that can scale.”
Building is hard
Partnership is Taiwo’s currency for doing business. Her quest to understand how healthcare systems work in Africa has taken her across the continent, including South Africa, Kenya, and Rwanda.
Inexperienced in running a successful startup, Taiwo knows that venture capital might take a while to come, so she’s compensating by getting advisory experience on her team. OpenHealth hasn’t yet achieved the level of traction Taiwo believes is necessary to attract venture capital, mainly because the product hasn’t found market fit.
She describes her startup’s monthly revenue inflows as “stagnant” and cites the need to educate more Africans about preventive healthcare rather than being reactive. But what she’s done with $1,000, a lean team, and minimal marketing, is something she’s proud of.
Yet, her goals remain lofty. And she’ll stop at nothing to bring them to fruition.
She sees Rwanda as the most receptive and regulatory dynamic country when it comes to open healthcare and emergency triage opportunities. In Rwanda, the government has embraced digital health frameworks and created clear protocols around AI use in healthcare, making it a top candidate for OpenHealth’s expansion.
“I’m really impressed by what Rwanda is doing,” said Taiwo. “If we were to scale today, Rwanda would be our first stop.”
But the terrain in other countries isn’t always this welcoming. For example, Taiwo recalls a botched API integration opportunity she scored with a South African clinic early in the year. The company was interested in what OpenHealth was building and at the time, Taiwo considered it an inadvertent opportunity for a soft expansion. However, this plan failed before it even took off, due to the data protection laws in South Africa.
“They wanted to know who would store the data, how it would be secured, and because most of our users were from other countries, the deal fell through,” Taiwo explains. “We’re not a software development firm, so we couldn’t white-label our platform just for them.”
The experience made one thing clear to her: scaling digital health across Africa is a regulatory chessboard. Different countries have different data laws, infrastructure readiness, and patient behaviours.
“We’re a team of dreamers and first-timers,” Taiwo said. “And we’re trying to figure things out as we go.”
Before the big break comes, don’t die
Taiwo is focused on keeping operations at OpenHealth above board. It’s a responsibility she’s latched onto since her undergrad days when she first decided she was going to build a healthtech company. She’d failed her first year of medical school and got dropped to anatomy, a path her parents still consider “a failure.”
“But that’s where the idea came from,” she said. “I had skin issues from stress and [was] going to the clinic repeatedly. I got tired and thought, ‘Why isn’t there a simple personalised tool to guide people through basic symptoms?’ So I built one.”
She sees strength in her company’s nimbleness and ability to move fast. So far, her instincts are proving right. The partnership with mDaaS has given her product credibility. But she’s careful not to let early wins cloud the work ahead.
There are days she still feels way out of her depth.
Monthly expenses at the startup are easily north of a modest $150, accounting for credit payments to OpenAI, retraining models—which are crucial to the business—as well as other staff overhead costs.
“What is driving OpenHealth right now is the love for what we’re building,” she said. “We show up at team meetings genuinely excited to talk about what we’re implementing. I hope we don’t get to a point where we lose our enthusiasm.” she says.
Despite minimal funding and competition, the team knows it is building OpenHealth because it needs to exist, she added.
Her co-founder is still in medical school, deciding whether to become a doctor or stay in digital health. Taiwo is certain he’ll pick the latter.
“He’s an AI engineer, and a brilliant one. But we’re both clear about this: whatever path we take, OpenHealth remains central.”
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