Healthtech

There is a particular kind of frustration that only a pharmacist can feel, watching a patient walk away empty-handed, not because the medicine does not exist but because the clinic that should stock it simply ran out of cash. For Christian Nwachukwu, that frustration was not abstract. It was his daily reality working in Northern Nigeria, and it eventually became the founding logic of 10MG Health.

When TechPolyp sat down with Nwachukwu, pharmacist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of one of West Africa’s most quietly impactful health technology companies, the conversation ranged from AI credit scoring and drug stockouts to currency risk, loan recovery, and what it truly means to build a healthcare company for underserved communities. What emerged was a portrait of a founder who is equal parts pragmatist and idealist – someone who has found a way to make the numbers work without losing sight of why the numbers matter.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Solve

Nigeria’s healthcare financing problem is not a secret. According to Nwachukwu, Africa carries a US$60 billion annual healthcare financing gap, a figure that encompasses everything from missing medicines to unmaintained equipment to clinics that cannot afford to keep their lights on. Traditional banks have largely refused to engage with this market, citing the absence of formal collateral, poor credit records, and what they consider unpredictable revenue streams in small healthcare facilities.

“Credit databases are fragmented, and most clinics have no formal credit history,” Nwachukwu told TechPolyp. “Traditional banks demand collateral and charge interest rates above 30 per cent, which most facilities simply cannot meet. Few fintechs focus directly on healthcare, so this sector remains underserved.”

The consequences play out in ways that are easily invisible to anyone not looking for them. A pharmacy runs out of antihypertensives. A clinic cannot restock its diabetes supplies. A small hospital defers purchasing surgical consumables. Each of these events is a financing failure as much as it is a healthcare one, and Nwachukwu saw an opportunity to address them at the root.

“Many of these healthcare providers run out of medicines and supplies because they cannot get credit quickly from banks. Our platform uses AI to turn their real-time purchase and repayment data into a credit score, which lenders can trust.”

Building the Credit Engine

10MG Health’s flagship product, 10MG Credit, is in many ways a deceptively simple idea. Rather than asking clinics and pharmacies to prove their creditworthiness through bank statements, tax records, or physical assets, all of which many small facilities lack, it builds a credit profile from something they already have, which is transaction data.

The platform embeds directly into e-pharmacy and health tech vendor platforms. When a healthcare provider uses a partner platform to order medicines or supplies, 10MG Credit quietly analyses their purchase history, repayment behaviour, and operational patterns in the background. Within five minutes, and in many cases, under 60 seconds, a credit score is generated. That score is passed to partner lenders, who can then make an instant financing decision, without requiring the facility to submit a single document or visit a branch.

“A clinic can get an instant loan, right at the point of ordering medicines when they use ‘Pay with 10mgCredit’, instead of waiting 90 days or more,” Nwachukwu explained. The model is designed to be invisible in the best possible way: healthcare providers do not have to change how they work. They simply order as they always would, and the financing is already there.

It is an approach that borrows conceptually from what buy-now-pay-later platforms have done in consumer retail, but applies it to a sector with far higher stakes. A pharmacy that cannot restock paracetamol is not just missing out on a sale; it is potentially leaving a feverish child without medication.

Who 10MG Serves and How It Finds Them

One of the more striking aspects of 10MG’s model is how deliberately it avoids the conventional startup instinct to chase the largest, most sophisticated clients. The company has instead oriented itself toward the facilities that larger players overlook entirely: small clinics, independent pharmacies, and community hospitals in areas that formal financial systems have long treated as too risky or too remote.

Nwachukwu was candid about how these facilities came to discover 10MG. The company does not cold-call hospitals or run traditional sales campaigns. Instead, healthcare providers encounter the platform organically, at the point of purchase, when they are already on a partner e-pharmacy platform and see the option to pay with 10MG Credit. This means adoption is tied directly to intent: facilities that access the platform are, by definition, actively trying to procure medicines.

This distribution model also explains how 10MG has managed to scale without the overhead of a large sales force. As of late 2025, more than 6,000 healthcare providers had used the platform, with 10MG reporting over US$3.4 million disbursed in loans. The company says it currently supports medicine access for approximately 183,000 patients monthly, many of them in rural and peri-urban communities where formal healthcare infrastructure is thin.

“We’ve disbursed over US$3.4 million in loans, supporting medicine access for 183,000 patients monthly, many in rural communities. Default rates are under three per cent, proving the model works.”

The default rate figure, under three per cent, is the one that perhaps says the most about the underlying model. In a market where banks cite repayment risk as the primary justification for excluding small healthcare providers, 10MG’s numbers suggest that the risk was always manageable. It simply required a different way of seeing it.

Operating Across Borders Without Losing Control

10MG Health currently operates in Nigeria and Senegal, with plans to expand into Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Mali over the next two to three years. But geographic expansion in West Africa comes with a specific set of complications, not least the currency question.

Nwachukwu was direct about this when TechPolyp raised it. The company deliberately operates in local currencies in each market it enters, rather than conducting transactions in US dollars or euros. This is a conscious risk management decision. Denominating loans and repayments in the same currency that healthcare facilities earn their revenue in, 10MG insulates both itself and its borrowers from the volatility of foreign exchange markets, a volatility that has become particularly acute in Nigeria in recent years, as the naira has undergone significant devaluation.

It also means the company must build separate operational infrastructure for each new country, rather than deploying a one-size-fits-all model. Regulatory environments differ. Digital platform ecosystems differ. The specific healthcare supply chains that 10MG can plug into differ. This is slower work, but Nwachukwu framed it as essential to building something durable rather than something that scales quickly and breaks.

The company’s expansion into Senegal is notable partly because it represents a step outside the Anglophone West African orbit that most Nigerian startups remain within. Operating in a francophone market with a different regulatory culture and a different financial system is a meaningful signal that 10MG intends to build genuinely regional infrastructure rather than a Lagos-centric solution dressed up as a continental one.

Measuring What Actually Matters

Healthcare technology companies often struggle with a particular measurement problem: their metrics tend to reflect financial activity rather than health outcomes. It is easy to count loans disbursed. It is harder, but more important, to know whether those loans translated into fewer stockouts, better patient access, or improved health at the community level.

10MG has approached this through a combination of KYC processes and monthly surveys that track patient impact at the facility level. The 183,000 patients monthly figure is not just a disbursement statistic; it represents the company’s attempt to connect its financial flows to the healthcare activity they are meant to enable. The platform also enables hospitals to offer credit at significantly lower interest rates than traditional banks, which Nwachukwu noted directly reduces costs for patients in addition to supporting the facilities themselves.

The broader context matters here. In Nigeria, out-of-pocket spending accounts for roughly 75 per cent of total health expenditure, and government spending on health remains one of the lowest in the world as a share of GDP. In this environment, a tool that reduces the cost of medicine procurement, even marginally, can have meaningful downstream effects on what patients actually pay when they visit a clinic.

From B2B to B2C and the Road Ahead

While 10MG has built its foundation on B2B services, financing healthcare providers rather than individual patients, Nwachukwu was open about the company’s intention to move toward B2C offerings. This would eventually mean providing financing directly to patients, particularly those managing chronic conditions who face recurring medication costs.

Chronic disease management is a significant and growing problem across West Africa, where conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and sickle cell disease require consistent medication adherence that many patients cannot sustain financially. A B2C offering from 10MG would position the company not just as infrastructure for healthcare providers but also as a direct financial lifeline for patients.

The company is also working toward aggregating health tech vendors, effectively becoming a platform that connects multiple e-pharmacy and health supply chain players under a single credit infrastructure. If successful, this would significantly expand the distribution network through which 10MG Credit reaches facilities, without requiring a proportional increase in 10MG’s own headcount.

Recognition and What It Signals

By the time TechPolyp spoke with Nwachukwu, 10MG Health had accumulated a pair of notable international recognitions. The company had been nominated for the Black Tech Achievement Awards Startup of the Year, taking place in London, an acknowledgement of its growing visibility within the African diaspora tech community. It had also recently won the AMBA BGA Excellence Award for Entrepreneur of the Year, also in London.

These awards are worth noting not simply as accolades, but as indicators of where the conversation about African health technology is happening. London has become an important staging ground for African startup recognition, home to a large Nigerian diaspora, a growing ecosystem of Africa-focused investors, and events that increasingly bring African founders into conversation with global capital.

For Nwachukwu, the nominations and wins represent an opportunity for greater visibility and, potentially, the kind of investor and media attention that can accelerate the next phase of 10MG’s growth. TechPolyp will be following the outcome of the Black Tech Achievement Awards event closely.

What 10MG Gets Right

It would be easy to describe 10MG Health as a fintech company operating in healthcare, or a healthtech company using fintech tools. Neither description quite captures what makes the model interesting. The more accurate framing might be that 10MG has found a way to use data infrastructure that already exists, transaction records on e-pharmacy platforms, to create a financial product that serves a market everyone else had decided was unserviceable.

That reframing has real consequences. It means the company does not need to build the data from scratch. It means adoption is frictionless because it meets healthcare providers where they already are. And it means the credit scores it generates are grounded in actual behaviour rather than proxies and assumptions.

In a sector where Africa’s healthcare financing gap is measured in the tens of billions of dollars, 10MG’s US$3.4 million in disbursements might seem modest. But what it has proven, a default rate under three per cent, 183,000 patients reached monthly, 6,000 facilities onboarded, is a model. And models, once proven, can scale.

Christian Nwachukwu started with the frustration of a pharmacist in Northern Nigeria watching patients leave without medicine. He is building toward a West Africa where that scenario becomes increasingly rare. Whether he gets there will depend on capital, regulatory environments, the pace of digital infrastructure expansion, and a dozen other variables beyond his control. But the logic is sound. And for now, the numbers back it up.