Nigeria dominates Bloomberg’s 25 African startups to watch in 2026

Nigeria has secured four spots on Bloomberg’s second annual “25 African Startups to Watch” list, reinforcing the country’s position as one of the continent’s most active hubs for high-impact, venture-backed innovation.

The featured companies: 10mg Health, Remedial Health, Sycamore, and Terra Industries span healthcare, fintech, and defence technology, reflecting the breadth of problems Nigerian founders are taking on and the growing confidence of investors in their ability to solve them.

Bloomberg’s list, published on May 28, 2026, identifies companies building solutions in environments where infrastructure or systems have failed to deliver. Nearly half of the total funding raised by companies on the list came from African investors, a notable shift from previous years when international capital dominated early-stage rounds on the continent.

10mg Health, founded by pharmacist Christian Nwachukwu in 2022, is targeting healthcare financing, a problem that quietly drives some of the worst health outcomes in Nigeria. 10mgCredit, the company’s main product, helps hospitals and pharmacies obtain necessary funds. This enables healthcare providers to continue operating in areas where patients often postpone treatment due to their inability to pay upfront.

The company combines financial technology with healthcare, using medical and behavioural data to assess credit risk more precisely than conventional lenders.

Remedial Health, founded by Samuel Okwuada and Victor Benjamin and backed by tech conglomerate Tencent, is attacking a different health crisis: counterfeit and substandard medicines, which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime links to an estimated 500,000 deaths every year in sub-Saharan Africa.

The startup’s platform helps pharmaceutical providers manage inventory, verify suppliers, and access financing. It now works with more than 14,000 providers across Nigeria and has helped finance over $40 million worth of medicine.

Sycamore, founded by Babatunde Akin-Moses, is a digital lending platform serving individuals and businesses in Nigeria while expanding to reach Africans in the UK and beyond. Bloomberg noted the company’s navigation of the familiar tension in digital lending, balancing aggressive growth with the underwriting discipline needed to survive long-term.

Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, stands out as a unique company on this list. The Lagos-based defence-tech startup builds mid-range drones and security systems to address the growing threat of jihadist groups in West Africa’s Sahel region, which have begun deploying retrofitted commercial drones against military positions and critical infrastructure.

The company has attracted investment from 8VC, controlled by Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and recently raised $34 million. It is currently building a second manufacturing facility in Ghana.

A broader story about what Nigerian startups are building

What ties these four startups together is the nature of the problems they are solving, not convenience plays or incremental improvements on existing products, but foundational interventions in sectors where the absence of working systems costs lives and limits economic participation.

Bloomberg’s framing is deliberate. The list explicitly spotlights startups “building solutions in environments where infrastructure or systems have failed to deliver.” For Nigeria, that description fits across healthcare financing, medicine supply chains, credit access, and national security.

Each of the four featured startups is, in different ways, building the infrastructure that the state or the market has not yet provided.

The broader list of 25 also includes startups from South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Somalia, Madagascar, Botswana, Egypt, Chad, and Mauritius, a reminder that while Nigeria holds a prominent position in Africa’s startup ecosystem, the continent’s innovation story is increasingly being written from multiple directions at once.

Also read: Equity funding into Africa declines rapidly in 2026 as startups raise $708m