Rest Essence never planned to build a health-tech company. That changed the night a family friend went into labour and was turned away from one hospital, taken to a second with no electricity, and finally delivered her baby by caesarean section under handheld flashlights at a third — before starting to haemorrhage in front of him. She survived, but the experience convinced Essence that Africa’s biggest unsolved problem might be sitting in plain sight: what happens to people in the gap between a medical emergency and the care that could save them. That question eventually became Medwaka, a platform now connecting patients to hospitals, ambulances, and trained first responders across Nigeria — though not at all in the form its founders originally imagined.
From Blood Drive to Emergency Network
Medwaka didn’t start as an emergency response platform. Before Essence got involved, co-founder Dr Muyiwa Oluwatobi had been piloting a much narrower idea in Ondo State: a tool connecting pregnant women to blood donors during obstetric emergencies. Essence met Oluwatobi, along with co-founders Dr Glennise Ayuk and Abakar Mahamat, through the Fishbowl Challenge, a programme that puts teams together to work on real-world problems. Looking at the blood-donation pilot, the four of them concluded it wasn’t ambitious enough — the real problem wasn’t blood specifically, it was that people in a medical crisis often had no idea where to go and no system capable of getting them there in time. They rebuilt the idea from the ground up, talking to healthcare workers, ambulance providers, and emergency responders to understand how emergency care actually functioned on the ground, and launched the rebuilt version, Medwaka, with a pilot in Ondo State in early 2024.
Motorbikes Before Ambulances
The early plan was straightforward on paper: train first responders, sign up hospitals, give people a number to call. Reality was messier. The team ran into low public awareness of emergency response services, no existing network of reliable first responders to draw on, and a serious shortage of ambulances to move patients once help arrived. Their workaround was resourceful — recruiting local volunteers with motorbikes who knew their neighbourhoods well enough to reach a patient faster than an ambulance ever could, while training healthcare workers as first responders and onboarding public and private hospitals onto the platform. By the end of 2024, that approach had produced 10 trained first responders and 5 partner hospitals — a real start, but a fraction of what a 911-style system would need.
The Ambulance Problem
That gap between ambition and infrastructure became Medwaka’s central obstacle. The founders had envisioned something close to a full emergency-response system in the mould of 911 — but running one meant either owning a fleet of ambulances, well outside an early-stage startup’s budget, or depending entirely on hospitals’ existing vehicles, which came with unpredictable delays and availability. Neither option let Medwaka guarantee the one thing its entire premise depended on: getting help to someone fast enough to matter.
The Pivot That Mattered
Rather than keep forcing an independent model that its own resources couldn’t support, Medwaka’s founders made the call to abandon the standalone 911 ambition and build around partnerships instead. “That was the biggest thing we did,” Essence said of the shift. The company redirected its focus away from public institutions and toward private hospitals, health maintenance organisations, government agencies, NGOs, and community organisations — including a partnership with the University of Medical Sciences in Ondo. Instead of trying to build parallel emergency infrastructure from scratch, Medwaka repositioned itself as a layer that strengthens the emergency response systems that already exist, expanding into emergency response technology, first-responder capacity building, digital coordination tools, and integration with existing healthcare systems.
Where Medwaka Stands Now
The shift shows up clearly in Medwaka’s numbers. The startup now has a team of 20 and has directly trained 11 first responders — barely more than its 2024 total — but has facilitated more than 550 emergency requests through its platform and partner network combined. That gap between a nearly flat responder count and a fast-growing request volume is itself the clearest evidence the pivot worked: Medwaka’s growth increasingly runs through the hospitals, HMOs, and agencies it partners with, not through a first-responder network it has to build and fund entirely on its own.
The Constant Underneath the Pivot
What hasn’t changed is the goal Essence set for himself the night his family friend nearly died in a hospital with no power: an emergency response ecosystem that actually connects patients, healthcare providers, first responders, and public institutions in real time. Medwaka just arrived at a very different route to get there — one built on making existing systems work better together, rather than replacing them with something built from zero.
