Adegoke Olubusi had a comfortable career going. He had worked at Goldman Sachs, then eBay, then PayPal, the kind of resume that opens doors anywhere in the world. But he was bored. "We thought, why don't we pick a problem that is a long term problem in Africa," he later explained. That decision led him, alongside Dimeji Sofowora and Tito Ovia, to found what was first called OneMedical in 2016, a company that would later become Helium Health.

The problem they picked was not glamorous. Most hospitals across Nigeria, and much of West Africa, were still running entirely on paper. Patient histories scattered across handwritten folders. No reliable way to track how many patients a hospital actually saw in a month. No data to show whether a clinic was profitable or losing money quietly. Olubusi and his co founders set out to build software that could digitize all of it, an electronic medical records system built specifically for African hospitals rather than imported wholesale from a system designed for the United States or Europe.

The early days were rough in a very specific way. The product worked, doctors could see that it worked, but the team building it was young, and that became its own obstacle. Olubusi has described going from hospital to hospital pitching to skeptical administrators who would tell them to come back once they had five or ten hospitals already signed up, even when those same administrators admitted the software itself was good. It took persistence to get past being underestimated before the product could speak for itself.

That persistence paid off. Helium Health got into Y Combinator's 2017 batch, which brought in early funding and credibility. From there, the company grew into the largest electronic medical records provider in West Africa, eventually reaching thousands of doctors across more than a hundred hospitals and handling well over a hundred thousand patient visits a month. Along the way, the company kept adding pieces. HeliumPay for handling hospital billing and payments. HeliumCredit, a lending product that uses a hospital's own operational data to score it for credit and offer loans without demanding collateral, something nearly impossible for a small clinic to get from a traditional bank. HeliumDoc for telemedicine. More recently, an AI powered clinical assistant called CareCopilot, and a self check tool that lets young people privately screen their risk for HIV, tuberculosis, and diabetes.

The numbers behind the mission are stark. Africa's healthcare sector faces a financing gap estimated at 66 billion dollars a year, and fewer than 1 in 10 healthcare facilities on the continent are digitized in any meaningful way. Helium Health's bet has always been that fixing the data problem first, knowing exactly how many patients a facility sees, how it bills, where the money leaks, unlocks everything else, from better care to easier access to credit for the hospitals themselves.

Investors have backed that bet steadily over the years. The company has raised over 40 million dollars in total, including a 30 million dollar Series B round led by AXA Investment Managers, with backers as varied as Tencent, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, and Anne Wojcicki, the co founder of 23andMe. That funding has helped Helium Health expand from Nigeria into Ghana, Liberia, and parts of East Africa, and even acquire Meddy, a healthcare booking platform based in the Middle East, pushing the company's reach beyond the continent entirely.

What stands out about Olubusi, Sofowora, and Ovia's story is how unglamorous the starting point was. There was no flashy app, no viral consumer moment, just three friends who looked at Africa's most broken, least digitized industry and decided that was exactly where they wanted to spend the next decade of their lives. Years later, with hospitals across the region running on systems they built, that decision looks less like boredom and more like vision.