Why Africa’s first healthtech unicorn is closer than you think

“Africa’s health tech story isn’t just beginning—it’s accelerating.” That was the powerful declaration by Dr. Ola Brown, Managing Partner at HealthCap Africa, during the launch of their latest Unicorn Insight Report. The message was clear: with a rapidly growing youth population, weakening reliance on donor aid, and a mobile-first user base, Africa is ripe for a digital health transformation that could soon produce its first billion-dollar healthtech company.

Dr Brown, a medical doctor with advanced degrees in finance, is also one of the first women in Nigeria to co-found a venture capital fund. She helped launch HealthCap Africa in 2020, a specialised investment firm focusing on early-stage healthtech and fintech startups in high-impact markets like Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa. The newly released report—Healthtech Unicorns Report 2.0.—aims to sharpen the conversation on where the next wave of healthcare innovation will come from and why Africa is no longer a wildcard, but a frontrunner.

According to her, Africa’s biggest healthcare challenges are also its most investable opportunities. With aid from institutions like the United States Agency for International Development(USAID), World Health Organisation (WHO), and, the global vaccine alliance (GAVI), either shrinking or disappearing entirely, the world is moving from charity to capital. This makes now the perfect time to build scalable, sustainable healthcare systems that can thrive without grants or donations. Over the past 5 months of 2025, African healthtech startups have raised $1.055 billion, with successful exits like InstaDeep’s billion-dollar acquisition by BioNTech and RapidDeploy’s acquisition by Motorola offering clear proof that Africa’s healthtech sector can compete globally.

While fintech has led the unicorn race on the continent, healthtech isn’t far behind. Africa remains the most efficient unicorn-producing region in the world when measured by dollars invested. Countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are treating healthtech as a defensive sector—one that grows regardless of macroeconomic cycles. Unlike consumer tech or crypto, healthtech addresses fundamental, non-discretionary needs like maternal care, drug distribution, and diagnostics. As Dr. Brown put it, “It’s impact-aligned, but commercial-first,” and that rare combination makes health tech a powerful force.

She also pointed to Asia as Africa’s closest comparative market. From India to Southeast Asia, healthcare investment strategies have helped scale care delivery in under-resourced environments. These Asian markets have faced and overcome many of the same problems Africa now contends with, such as underfunding, lack of infrastructure, and a shortage of healthcare workers. The idea is not to replicate blindly, but to learn intelligently from what already works.

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Joining Dr Brown at the report launch was Dr Amit Varma, founder of Quadria Capital, one of Asia’s largest healthcare funds with over $3 billion in assets deployed. In his keynote, he outlined four strategic levers that will drive Africa’s first healthtech unicorn. Some of them include using technology to amplify human capacity rather than replace it, funding companies with both ROI and social impact in mind, building interoperable systems for cross-border scale, and working with-not around- governments. He emphasised that no country has ever achieved universal health coverage without a strong public-private partnership, a point that resonated with the audience, even though startups often shy away from working with the public sector.

Dr Varma also stressed the importance of platform thinking. Unicorns, he argued, do not emerge from single-point solutions. Instead, they are born from startups that integrate various elements such as tech, infrastructure, policy, and user behaviour into one cohesive system.

HealthCap Africa’s portfolio provides a strong foundation for this argument. The firm claims to have backed more than 16 startups operating in over 10 countries. Together, these companies have raised nearly $100 million in follow-on capital, created over 1,000 direct jobs and 12,000 indirect ones, and now serve more than 2 million patients. Startups like InstantRad, Emergency Response Africa, and LifeBank are already defining what platform-based, scalable healthtech looks like in the African context.

The momentum is not slowing down. With over $12 million in healthtech funding already deployed, increasing regulatory openness (especially in Nigeria), and the explosion of smartphone usage across the continent, the ground is fertile. The necessary building blocks—capital, policy, talent, and technology—are now aligning in ways never seen before.

Africa’s first healthtech unicorn is no longer a distant dream. It is an imminent reality. The window of opportunity has opened, and those startups that can blend innovation with real-world healthcare outcomes will not only scale—they will define a new global standard for impact-driven technology. 

The only question left is who will seize this moment?