Meet Waspito, the African healthtech startup that won LEAP 2026

A first for African health tech at LEAP Waspito, a telemedicine platform with roots in Cameroon, became the first African startup to win the $250,000 grand prize at LEAP 2026's Rocket Fuel competition, according to Business Tech Africa . LEAP is Saudi Arabia's flagship technology event, held annually in Riyadh, and Rocket Fuel is its startup competition track, where founders from around the world pitch for cash prizes and, just as importantly, visibility in front of Gulf investors, corporates and government buyers who attend the event in large numbers. Waspito's win puts it alongside a small group of Rocket Fuel winners spanning space technology, data-centre cooling, healthtech and hardware, whose stories TechScoop has been tracking as a group in its roundup of every 2026 Rocket Fuel winner . Those other winners include SARsatX in synthetic-aperture-radar satellites, Ferveret in immersion cooling for data centres, Carevision and Kanz among the healthtech and founder-award recipients, and Melt Water and Imagine Devices rounding out a list that skewed heavily toward hard infrastructure and physical-world problems rather than software alone. Telemedicine built for Africa's access gap At its core, Waspito is a telemedicine business: a platform that connects patients with doctors remotely rather than requiring an in-person clinic visit. That model addresses a familiar problem across much of Africa, where the distance between where people live and where qualified doctors practise can be significant, and where a remote video consultation can be the difference between getting care quickly and not getting it at all. Waspito has built out operations across African markets on the back of that proposition, positioning remote consultation as the front door to a broader set of health services rather than a standalone feature bolted onto an existing clinic network. That framing matters because telemedicine on its own has a well-known limitation: a video call can triage a patient and offer guidance, but it cannot draw blood, run a test or physically examine someone. Startups that stop at video consultations tend to hit a ceiling in what conditions they can meaningfully help with. Waspito's answer to that ceiling is the second half of its model. Mobile labs bring diagnostics to where patients are What differentiates Waspito from a simple video-consultation app is its mobile lab component. Rather than stopping at a diagnosis over a call, the company extends its service into physical diagnostics, bringing lab-testing capability closer to patients instead of requiring them to travel to a fixed facility. That combination — remote clinical triage paired with mobile, on-the-ground diagnostics — is a more complete answer to the access problem than telemedicine alone, since a remote consultation is only as useful as the lab work and follow-up care that can be attached to it afterward. In practice, that means Waspito's operational footprint looks less like a pure software company and more like a hybrid logistics-and-care business: it has to manage not just an app and a roster of doctors, but home sample collection and the digital delivery of results across the markets it serves. That is a harder business to build than a chat-based telehealth app, but it is also a harder one for competitors to copy quickly, since it requires real infrastructure on the ground rather than just code. A model built to work across borders Alongside consultations and diagnostics for individual patients, Waspito has also built services for organisations that finance healthcare, such as employers and insurers, which use the platform to manage healthcare spending while giving people access to medical services, according to Business Tech Africa . The company operates in Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire, where it now connects about 1.1 million patients with 2,100 doctors and more than 500 healthcare providers, and after its 2023 funding round it said it planned to expand into markets including Senegal and Gabon. Why LEAP mattered Winning LEAP's top Rocket Fuel prize is significant for Waspito on two levels. The immediate one is the $250,000 award itself. The second, arguably larger one, is exposure: LEAP draws Saudi government bodies, regional investors and corporates who rarely get a close look at African healthtech founders, and a headline win in Riyadh is the kind of signal that travels well with all three audiences. For a startup that has spent its early years proving out a model market by market across Africa, a single high-visibility win of this kind can do more for name recognition among Gulf decision-makers than years of conventional outreach would have managed on its own. It is also a useful data point about the kind of company LEAP's judges chose to reward this year. The grand prize went to a business solving a genuinely hard, physical-world problem — getting diagnosis and diagnostics to people who cannot easily reach either — using a combination of softwar