A letter from our founder

I grew up seeing healthcare from the provider's side. My grandfather founded The Nairobi West Hospital, and my father has carried that work across much of Africa, building an industry-defining legacy of his own. Sport gave me a second lens. Four years as an international athlete for Kenya taught me to see the body as a system: sleep, load, nutrition, recovery and mind, held in balance. Healthcare mostly works the other way, waiting for one part to break and treating that part alone. I wanted to build care that is holistic, continuous and preventive.

Stanford gave me the place to start. It was nothing like the academic pressure I had grown up with; it was about building. AI was being built in the rooms next to mine, and my classes in healthcare, venture capital and leadership turned that energy into frameworks I could act on. I have had the privilege of testing my ideas with Stanford professors as they formed, and now of having them help me develop those ideas further, in an environment that cultivates innovation and rewards thinking outside the box. I want to bring that same appetite home, and turn what the press now calls the Silicon Savannah into nothing short of the Valley itself.

The turning point came in a class on the future of America's healthcare policy. We spent weeks on Medicaid, a system held back by decades of legacy infrastructure, fragmented records and data migrations that never end. Africa stands at the opposite point: about to digitize its health systems for the first time, free of that legacy, with the chance to design out the fraud of past schemes from day one. I tested that idea over several conversations with Dr David Ndii on the Kenyan economy.

S1C Holdings began in my freshman year: Jiva Labs that fall, Sugen that winter, JivaCloud that spring and Setu that July. The last three months have been the most exhilarating of my life. We travelled across Kenya, walking into facilities of every kind and learning everything we could, then across East Africa, working alongside doctors at hospitals of every size and speciality. We saw the problem we set out to solve firsthand and broke it down, step by step, to its fundamentals. I could not have asked for a better team to do it with, and that team is only just getting started.

I have a deep interest in philanthropy across this continent, and I have come to believe that the most lasting way to serve it is to build: a company with the discipline to transform one of the hardest and most traditional industries in the world, and to make it work for everyone it touches, from patients and clinicians to providers, payers and governments. It is the work I am most passionate about, with people I love working with, and we cannot wait to bring more people into it.

The work is already underway. We started in Mombasa County to prove the model at county scale, capex-free, with Melco as our equipment partner, so digitization adds no strain to an already stretched economy. We have launched our Tanzania pilot in Zanzibar, with the DRC, Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique already in the pipeline. From there, the rest of the continent.