Startups On Our Radar spotlights African startups solving African challenges with innovation. In our previous edition, we featured startups that fought it out on the highly competitive TC Battlefield stage at Moonshot 2025. Expect the next dispatch on November 7, 2025.
This week, we explore seven African startups in the healthcare, waste management, culinary, and artificial intelligence sectors and why they should be on your watchlist. Let’s dive into it:
1. TrashCoin wants to turn waste into wealth (CleanTech, Nigeria)
Founded by Wogu Nnodim Eliot and Phebe Ilesanmi, Trashcoin is a digital waste management platform that allows individuals and businesses to monetise their recyclable waste. The platform operates through a mobile app and USSD code, connecting users with a network of local collection agents. Anyone with a small space, a jumbo bag, a scale, and a smartphone can register as an agent. They can then fund their wallet with an initial balance of ₦10,000 and begin collecting recyclables from people in their community.
Users can locate the closest trash collection hub through the Trashcoin app. At the hub, an agent weighs the sorted recyclables and generates a unique digital voucher for the user, which they scan via the Trashcoin app to receive instant payment into their in-app wallet. This money can be withdrawn to a bank account or used directly within the app to pay for electricity, airtime and data, health insurance, and fees for exams like WAEC and JAMB. All this is facilitated through partnerships with payment gateways like Flutterwave.
TrashCoin’s platform also empowers its collection agents to buy waste from users and sell it at a profit to larger recycling companies.
The platform currently focuses on recyclables whose supply chains and resale markets are predictable, including plastic bottles, paper, fabrics, and aluminium cans. The startup is not yet accepting e-waste because the founders say that the valuation and processing chain for e-waste is more complex. The platform is built on blockchain, which allows for every kilogram of waste to be traced from household to recycling plant.
Trashcoin makes money from reselling recyclables, service fees on wallet transactions, commissions from utility and bill-payment services, and selling data insights for waste policy planning. Their largest revenue line comes from supplying processed materials to international recycling buyers, including a contract to supply up to 150 tonnes of waste monthly to European recyclers.
Why we’re watching: In 2016, Africa generated 174 million tonnes of waste per year. It is projected that by 2050, Africa will be generating 516 million tonnes of waste per year. Without robust management systems, this will lead to increased pollution. Trashcoin stands out by building a scalable and transparent solution to this crisis. Its core differentiator is its blockchain-powered infrastructure, which records who recycled what, where, and when, creating a transparent chain of custody that provides verifiable data for corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting.
Unlike competitors like Pakam in Lagos and Ecobarter in Abuja, who often use a delayed points system, Trashcoin’s instant cash rewards create a powerful incentive for consistent recycling. The startup has attracted significant partners, including Coca-Cola, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Google, and says it has $375,000 in annual recurring revenue. TrashCoin has already recycled over 2.5 million kilograms of waste and paid out $105,000 to over 5,800 users.
2. Priv Health is building an environment where men feel allowed to care for themselves (Healthtech, Nigeria)
Priv Health is designed to address conditions where stigma often prevents men from seeking conventional healthcare, including erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, sexually transmitted diseases (STIs), and mental health.
A user’s journey on Priv Health begins by visiting the website and selecting a goal rather than a medical condition, which could be ‘get stronger erections’ or ‘last longer in bed.’ After picking a goal, the user fills out an intake form to detail their symptoms and health history. The platform’s system performs an initial analysis and may suggest a preliminary course of action, like medication or lab testing. After the user makes a payment, an in-house Priv Health doctor reviews the assessment, validates the system’s recommendation, and conducts a follow-up consultation. If a prescription is required, Priv Health partners with pharmacies and logistics providers to deliver medication in discreet and unmarked packaging.
For cases needing further investigation, the startup arranges at-home lab testing through its lab partners, who collect samples from the user’s preferred location. Launched in January 2024, Priv Health has attended to over 1,000 men and claims to have generated ₦20 million in revenue from consultation fees, commission on lab tests (20%), and markups on medications (50%). Beyond care delivery, the company is building men’s health communities on Telegram and other platforms to act as awareness pipelines and cultural reframing spaces around men’s health. These platforms have up to 6,000 members.
Why we’re watching: A 2025 study revealed that there is a poor uptake of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services by men in Nigeria, mostly due to poor health-seeking behaviour among men, doubt about the protection of their confidentiality by health workers, preference for male-focused SRH services, and SRH facilities not being perceived as ‘male-friendly spaces’. Priv Health’s real differentiation lies in its cultural and behavioural aspects.
Instead of building a generic telehealth platform, it has created a purpose-built ecosystem for men, addressing the core barriers of stigma and inconvenience. The platform operates an asynchronous model, which allows users to seek care without scheduling real-time video calls. All they need to do is fill out a form with all necessary details, and a doctor will respond within 24 hours. Priv Health is carving out a niche for itself as a trusted digital space for men’s health.
3. Oyster wants to end skincare guesswork with its AI-powered analysis tool (Healthtech, Nigeria)
For many African consumers, buying skincare products is often an expensive process of trial and error, driven by influencer marketing rather than science. This guesswork can lead to adverse skin reactions, ineffective results, and wasted money. Jude Chikezie, former commercial director at YC-backed Curasel and founder of Oyster, experienced this firsthand. From years of consulting for brands and retailers like Teeka4 and Nivea, Chikezie saw retailers dealing with tens of thousands of product return complaints monthly from consumers who bought products recommended on TikTok or by influencers and had reactions.
Oyster is building AI infrastructure for the beauty industry, starting with a tool that analyses your skin using your phone’s camera and recommends products based on several factors. The platform has a direct-to-consumer mobile app and an API for businesses. Through the app, users take a few pictures of their face, and the AI conducts a detailed skin analysis, identifying concerns like acne, hyperpigmentation, enlarged pores, and under-eye darkness. Based on the analysis, the user’s skin type, concerns, budget, and lifestyle, the app generates a personalised morning and night routine with specific product recommendations, explaining why each product fits.
Oyster also doubles as a beauty e-commerce marketplace. Through partnerships with authorised retailers, to prevent fake products, users can purchase these products directly through the app and track their daily routine to ensure consistency. Delivery is fulfilled through logistics partners, and users can check the movement of their orders. Oyster offers an API widget that beauty retailers can plug into their online stores for shoppers to scan their skin before purchasing a product, reducing returns and improving product match accuracy. Users receive three free scans monthly. Once they buy a product on the app, the number of scans increases, allowing them to monitor how their skin reacts to certain products over time.
Why we’re watching: A key differentiator for Oyster is its data. While global skincare AI models are mostly trained on lighter skin tones, Oyster trained its models primarily on African and darker-skin datasets. The company partnered with aestheticians and dermatologists to collect anonymised skin consultation data, while its in-house medical team structured the notes. Oyster is embedding its technology across the entire beauty retail ecosystem. While the platform can escalate cases to dermatologists, its primary focus is on using AI to solve skincare problems at scale.
Oyster generates revenue through subscriptions, service charges from businesses that embed the skin scan feature on their websites, a 7% commission from every e-commerce transaction that occurs on the app, and the sale of in-store screens that allow shoppers to perform scans and receive instant product recommendations from that retailer’s inventory. The startup says it has generated around $151,000 in revenue, primarily from its B2B clients, and has amassed a user base of 50,000 people.
4. BimpeAI is building an AI operating system for Africa’s restaurants (AI, Nigeria)
Elisha Odemakinde, co-founder of the AI research lab Rectlabs, saw an opportunity to solve the problem of manual and inefficient operations that some African restaurants struggle with by creating an all-in-one platform to streamline restaurant management. Between delivery platforms, WhatsApp/SMS customer care, social ordering links, and manual record keeping, restaurants often operate across different fragmented tools to carry out an action. BimpeAI is an AI-powered operating system designed to help restaurants maximise profit by unifying their operations. The platform integrates directly with a restaurant’s social channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, deploying an AI chatbot that can automatically take orders and answer customer queries. For in-person dining, customers can scan a QR code at their table to interact with the AI via WhatsApp.
The AI recommends menu items, takes the order, confirms quantities, generates a payment link, logs the order in the kitchen dashboard, and triggers delivery scheduling if needed. If the restaurant prefers, staff can step in at any point to reply manually. The system tracks every customer interaction across access points, builds contact lists, and keeps purchasing histories. It also enables the restaurant to run automated WhatsApp campaigns and send reminders to users.
On the operational side, BimpeAI serves as a central hub where restaurateurs can view analytics about daily revenue summaries, staff performance trends, peak hours, menu insights, and delivery timelines. BimpeAI charges a monthly subscription fee of ₦100,000 in Nigeria, £100 in the UK, and $100 in the US and takes a 2% processing fee on orders. The BimpeAI team has also integrated an AI voice agent for restaurants with UK phone integrations via Twilio. A customer can call the restaurant number, state their order, receive pricing, choose delivery or pickup, provide their address, and receive a payment link, all handled by the AI. The team is in active conversations to replicate this in Nigeria through potential telco integrations so that restaurants can use their existing phone numbers.
Why we’re watching: BimpeAI matters because many technologies that exist for African restaurants have been built around payments and delivery. BimpeAI sits at the layer of maintaining relationships with customers. BimpeAI is building an omnichannel solution that meets customers wherever they are. Its most impressive feature is the AI phone call assistant, which automates voice orders. The platform also supports voice note ordering on WhatsApp. The company aims to become an integration layer for commerce, connecting with delivery partners, payment gateways, food delivery platforms, and e-commerce giants.
5. PostPaddy wants to put an AI-powered marketing agency on your phone (Marketing, Nigeria)
PostPaddy, led by Ibukun Adegbulugbe, is building a suite of AI-powered marketing tools designed to replace the need for hiring marketing agencies or juggling multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. Its flagship product today is Ads by PostPaddy, a platform that functions as an ad agency in your pocket. It allows users to set up a complete ad campaign on platforms like Snapchat and Google.
A business owner downloads the app, inputs a short description of what they want to promote, selects the platforms they want to advertise on, enters their target location and budget, and PostPaddy handles the rest. The system performs keyword research, audience targeting, campaign structuring, copywriting, creative setup, and performance forecasting. In under five minutes, a campaign that would normally require one to two days of manual work is live.
The platform features a forecasting tool that estimates the expected reach for any budget and allows users to pay in Naira directly within the app. Users can also connect their own ad accounts directly to the platform. The startup officially launched its ads product during Moonshot 2025 and has already seen its first few users start campaigns. PostPaddy’s revenue model for its ads tool is twofold. Users who connect their own ad accounts pay a subscription fee, while those who use PostPaddy’s ad account are charged a small commission on their ad spend.
Why we’re watching: In Nigeria, ad spending in the Social Media Advertising market is projected to pass $287 million by 2030. PostPaddy’s main differentiator is its focus on simplicity, by creating a tool that anyone can use without tutorials or prior experience. The company’s vision is to build an entire marketing suite. It is currently developing tools for social media management, email marketing, and landing page creation.
Unlike single-purpose platforms like Buffer or Mailchimp, PostPaddy aims to become a unified dashboard where businesses can manage all their marketing needs, from creating a full content calendar with AI-generated captions and graphics to launching multi-channel campaigns. The platform constantly optimises these campaigns. Once campaigns are running, the AI reviews performance data, identifies issues in reach, conversions or engagement, and proposes adjustments to maximise reach and engagement. The company plans to add support for Meta ads within a month.
6. Writinova has an AI writing environment for students (AI, Nigeria)
Writinova is an AI-powered writing workspace designed specifically for university students who struggle with writing assignments, essays, reports and final-year projects. Usually, students who use the assistance of AI in writing their project have to copy their chats with the AI bot and paste them into Word or Google Docs. Instead of a separate chat interface with an AI chatbot, Writinova embeds its AI tools inside the writing editor.
Users begin by selecting a document template, which could be in the form of an essay, logbook, or research paper, and then provide a brief description of what they want to achieve, including keywords. Writinova generates a structured draft that is broken into logical sections. The AI provides the first section of the document to get them started. The rest of the document sits behind a paywall that is unlocked after the student pays a small one-time fee of ₦1,000. The price changes depending on the document type. Writinova has key features that allow students to highlight sentences they do not understand, and then the system explains, rewrites, simplifies, and provides extra context for them. The editor also has a built-in research search engine that pulls academic papers from publicly available databases, and when these papers are cited inside a Writinova document, the citation is automatically formatted and added to the bibliography section.
The founder noted that Writinova has no subscription fee deliberately because students are unlikely to maintain recurring payments, but will pay situationally when an assignment is due. Since the launch of its beta in July 2025, the platform has attracted over 2,000 students from various universities. The product’s AI layer is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT models, including GPT-4 and GPT-5 variations. For academic references, Writinova continuously indexes research papers from open-access academic libraries.
Why we’re watching: Writinova is a tool specifically built for academic writing with student-specific documents and a built-in citation system that properly references the academic papers it indexes. Other academic writing AI tools like Grammarly primarily correct or refine existing text, but Writinova is generative, creating entire document structures and sections from scratch.
7. RosyJobs wants to bring global job opportunities into your messaging apps (HRTeach, UK)
RosyJobs is building a conversational AI that delivers personalised job openings directly inside the messaging platforms people already use the most, starting with Telegram. The idea began with WhatsApp, but with Meta’s verification process dragging for months, the founder, David Obi, shifted the rollout to Telegram. The platform is currently in a pre-launch testing phase, but it is live and operational on Telegram. RosyJobs now operates as a conversational job assistant that asks users what roles they’re seeking, where they want to work, and how they prefer to work (remote, on-site, or hybrid).
Once those preferences are entered, the AI matches the user with jobs sourced from vetted global job boards, like Adzuna, Jooble, Careerjet, and Indeed. The core job-finding service is currently free to use, although the startup plans to introduce premium features, beginning with an advanced AI-powered CV builder that will offer professionally designed templates for a fee.
Why we’re watching: RosyJobs’ primary differentiator is its channel of delivery. The platform meets users where they already are and removes the tediousness of navigating multiple job platforms, lowering the barrier to entry and making job discovery a more convenient experience. RosyJobs exclusively partners with reputable and vetted international job boards, thereby building a foundation of trust that protects users from fake listings. The planned introduction of a premium AI resume builder is setting RosyJobs up to become a more comprehensive career tool, and not just a job alert service.
That’s all for today. Expect our next dispatch on October 17th. Know a startup we should feature next? Please nominate here.
