A Nigerian startup is building what its founder describes as a healthcare operating system — an AI-powered platform designed to address fragmentation, diagnostic errors and access gaps across Africa’s healthcare systems — born out of his own near-fatal misdiagnosis.
Monte Sereno Health was founded in 2021 by Clement Okoh, who walked into a Lagos hospital on March 20, 2017, with what previous doctors had assessed as a muscle strain. Within hours, he could no longer walk. The condition was later diagnosed as aggressive multiple myeloma — a blood cancer eating away at his spine. By the time the misdiagnosis was identified, the tumor had so weakened his vertebrae that a minor fall left him paralyzed.
Okoh was flown to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where doctors gave him four to five years to live and warned of risks including stroke, pulmonary embolism and internal bleeding. Surgeons removed the tumor and fused his spine. Although his neurosurgeon told him he would never walk again, he eventually did. During recovery, Okoh resolved that if he survived, he would return to Nigeria to build systems that could reduce the chances of similar outcomes for others.
The structural problem Monte Sereno is trying to address is fragmentation. Patients across Africa often move between informal providers, under-resourced clinics, pharmacies and laboratories that rarely share data, while overstretched doctors make decisions with incomplete information. A 2021 World Health Organization report on health information systems found that 30 of 47 African countries lacked the capacity to accurately register births and deaths, with cause-of-death data largely unavailable.
Globally, up to 20% of serious conditions are misdiagnosed during initial visits, according to a Mayo Clinic study. A 2025 cross-sectional study of Nigerian medical practitioners found prevalence rates for medical errors ranging from 42.8% to 89.8%. Telehealth, which has expanded access in recent years, addresses some gaps but offers limited oversight or quality control during consultations. “You have no idea who you’re talking to, and there’s no real-time quality check,” Okoh said.
Monte Sereno’s platform is intended to act as a layer that connects every part of the care journey rather than another standalone telemedicine app. Its AI agent, called StarPilot, sits alongside doctor and patient during consultations, analyzing symptoms in real time, pulling medical records and querying global research databases. If a patient reports a fever and headache, the system asks where the patient has traveled, cross-references disease prevalence and suggests follow-up questions or tests — for example, prompting a clinician to rule out malaria or typhoid in a Lagos context rather than defaulting to flu. “The AI can challenge both the doctor and the patient in real time,” Okoh said. “But the doctor still makes the final call.”
A central feature of the platform is a portable electronic health record that follows the patient across providers and geographies. The system digitizes paper records on upload and continuously updates the patient profile. It also flags medications rendered unsafe by new research and alerts both doctor and patient to drug conflicts.
The platform is being designed for African operating constraints. The continent faces a projected health workforce shortfall of 6.1 million workers by 2030, alongside a $66 billion annual gap in health financing, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Nigerian doctor-to-patient ratios can reach one to 10,000, according to the Nigeria Medical Association, with some rural patients traveling more than 30 kilometers to access care.
Built-in translation tools allow doctors in countries such as India, Egypt and across Latin America to consult Nigerian patients without language barriers, with each participant viewing responses in their preferred language. The platform also supports shared consultations, modeled on trials in India, where multiple patients can be assessed using a single device — extending care to communities with limited smartphone access and reliable internet.
The shared-device model raises privacy concerns. Okoh said the company has put safeguards in place. “We opted out of letting LLM providers use any data from our platform to train their models,” he said. “We also have strict privacy agreements in place, and all data is encrypted and anonymised. Our serverless infrastructure on AWS is HIPAA-compliant.”
A defining feature of the platform is its attempt to integrate informal healthcare providers rather than replace them. The WHO Regional Office for Africa noted in 2023 that 80% of the continent’s population still relies on traditional medicine for basic health needs, with most traditional providers operating without oversight or connection to hospitals.
On April 13, Monte Sereno signed a partnership with the Institute of Public Health at Obafemi Awolowo University to deploy agentic AI in maternal care and traditional African medicine. The $454,000 project, funded by the Wilkie Family Foundation with support from AWS and NVIDIA, focuses on formalizing traditional care practices and developing African language models. As part of the effort, the company has created a population-scale program to onboard 1,000 traditional birth attendants across Lagos and Osun States, with the potential to impact more than 25,000 newborns.
Nigeria accounts for nearly 28.5% of all global maternal deaths, according to a UN report — many occurring in settings where skilled medical support is unavailable. Monte Sereno plans to use augmented reality tools to guide midwives through procedures visually, overlaying instructions on their field of view, with the ability to escalate complications to a remote doctor instantly. The company also intends to catalogue, analyze and validate traditional remedies to build a structured digital database of medicines.
Beyond diagnosis and care delivery, the platform is designed to shift healthcare toward prevention. It incorporates wellness monitoring that allows users to track vital signs using only a smartphone camera, with Okoh claiming basic health metrics can be generated in under two minutes.
Monte Sereno Health says it has raised $1 million from the Wilkie Family Foundation, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services, and is now seeking an additional $2.5 million. Existing backers including the Wilkie Foundation and Anthropic have signaled interest in the round. “The plan is to secure a lead investor and bring the round up to $2.5 million,” Okoh said. “While most startups use that capital to build and acquire customers, we’ve already figured out how to grow without heavy spending on acquisition.”
Pilot programs in India and Nigeria have engaged around 50 doctors and reached roughly 2,000 users to date. The company is scaling through partnerships with banks, churches, state governments, health maintenance organizations, universities and community organizations ahead of a broader public rollout planned for June 2026.
