Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem added 65 startups between 2020 and 2025, according to the State of Healthtech in Nigeria 2026 report, curated by TechCabal Insights, Digital Health Nigeria, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
The figure represents more than half of the 103 startups launched in the 15 years before the pandemic, and reflects approximately 65% growth in startup activity.
While COVID-19 drove Nigeria’s healthtech boom, the sector is now entering a tougher phase where startups must prove they can survive weak infrastructure, low insurance coverage and slowing funding after the pandemic urgency faded.
The report found that 17 healthtech startups launched in 2020 alone, the highest recorded in the ecosystem in a year. Today, Nigeria has 128 active healthtech startups operating across telehealth, healthcare analytics, digital supply chains, e-pharmacy, digital healthcare financing, and other subsectors, it noted.
The struggle before the growth
Before the pandemic, the healthtech sector struggled with adoption due to limited digital infrastructure, poor internet access, high income inequality, and low digital literacy among users. For many founders, one of the biggest challenges was convincing people that healthcare services could happen digitally at all.
“When we started in 2017, telemedicine was still poorly understood, infrastructure was limited, there were no cohesive policies or guidelines, and trust in digital healthcare was low,” Funmi Adewara, Founder and CEO of Mobihealth, a telemedicine platform, told TechCabal in an email on Wednesday. “We had to educate patients, regulators, partners, and even healthcare professionals.”
Founders described having to rethink how they distributed their products as users remained reluctant to download standalone healthcare apps. However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed those adoption barriers almost overnight.
Some founders described the pandemic as the moment digital healthcare became more urgent and commercially viable. As lockdown restrictions made hospital visits more difficult and the fear of physical contact increased, services such as remote consultations, digital prescriptions, medication delivery, and ordering at-home tests became more relevant.
Rest Essence, co-founder of MedWaka, a healthtech startup launched in 2021, said the pandemic changed how both users and founders viewed digital healthcare.
“Before COVID, healthtech was a nice-to-have,” he told TechCabal in an interview on Thursday. “But post-COVID, it became a must-have. You could no longer step outside. So, the ecosystem completely changed. We got used to an entirely new world, and so it became the norm.”
While the pandemic accelerated startup launches and digital healthcare adoption, that growth did not translate into long-term sustainability across the ecosystem. Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem currently has 40 inactive startups, and 97% of these startups were founded before the pandemic, according to the report.
The report identified spikes in startup closures in 2018, 2019, and 2023, with 13 startups ceasing operations during those periods. Among these are Healthlane and genomics startup 54gene, which raised approximately $45 million before shutting down in 2023.
Although the report does not directly attribute the startup closures to any single factor, founders and investors pointed to a mix of infrastructure challenges, market saturation, monetisation difficulties and funding slowdown as possible reasons why many early healthtech startups struggled to survive.
Healthtech funding surged then cooled
According to the report, funding into Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem rose during and after the pandemic, growing from approximately $5.5 million in 2019 to about $47.32 million in 2021 before peaking at nearly $55 million in 2023.
However, funding to the sector fell by more than 67% to approximately $18 million in 2024 and about $3 million in 2025.
The surge signalled how the pandemic exposed gaps in healthcare access and pushed investors toward startups solving problems around remote consultations and medicine delivery.
Abiodun Adereni, founder of HelpMum, a Nigerian healthtech startup that provides solutions to maternal mortality, said that many founders, including himself, believed the rapid growth in digital healthcare adoption during the pandemic would continue long after lockdown restrictions eased.
However, as physical movement resumed and healthcare systems reopened, startups faced a tougher climate around sustainability beyond the urgency created by the pandemic.
The funding slowdown also revealed differences in how investors viewed various healthtech subsectors. According to the report, telehealth currently has the highest number of startups within Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem but ranks sixth in total funding attracted across subsectors.
Kola Aina, founding partner at Ventures Platform, a pan-African venture capital firm, explained that telehealth’s accessible operating model likely contributed to the rapid increase in startup activity within the subsector.
“But capital doesn’t just follow the number of startups,” Aina told TechCabal. “It follows the depth of the problem being solved and the defensibility of the solution.”
According to him, the more measured investor appetite towards telehealth could be explained by the sector’s struggle to fully deliver on the scale many investors initially expected, revealing a gap between promise and demonstrated impact.
“On the telehealth side, there was a period when many believed it would transform access across the continent. The reality is more complicated,” Aina said. He explained that unreliable internet connectivity in rural and peri-urban areas, combined with high data costs for many users, limited the scale that telehealth companies could achieve.
“There are more enablers emerging now, but the infrastructure constraints mean telehealth hasn’t scaled in the way the early enthusiasm suggested it would.”
Aina noted that restoring investor confidence in the sector would require founders to demonstrate clearer paths to monetisation in a healthcare system where insurance penetration remains low, and affordability continues to shape user behaviour.
He mentioned that investors would look for startups capable of scaling sustainably, while proving that they can operate in difficult market conditions and keep building regardless.
“If more founders can show that combination, investor confidence will follow,” he noted.
The State of Healthtech in Nigeria 2026 report suggests that while the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Nigeria’s healthtech ecosystem, years after the lockdown ended, the sector is entering a defining phase that will determine which startups can survive within Nigeria’s healthcare realities.
