Waspito, a Cameroon-headquartered health-tech startup, won the $250,000 LEAP Award at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh this week, the single largest prize handed out at one of the world’s biggest technology events. The win makes Waspito the first African startup to take the top prize at LEAP’s Rocket Fuel competition, capping a run that started with more than 3,000 startups applying worldwide and narrowed down to just 100 finalists invited to pitch on stage.
Waspito is an AI-powered software company built around teleconsultations and digital health systems, designed to widen access to medical care across Africa by connecting patients, healthcare providers, and payers on a single platform. Founded and led by Jean Lobe Lobe, the company has already built real infrastructure behind that pitch, including a live partnership with Belife Insurance Cameroun that gives insured customers access to a network of more than 2,000 doctors available 24 hours a day through Waspito’s telemedicine platform, entirely free at the point of consultation. By the time it reached Riyadh, Waspito was already operating at Series A stage, meaning the company arrived at LEAP with real traction behind it rather than pitching a purely early-stage concept.
The scale of what Waspito actually won is worth putting in context. Rocket Fuel’s total prize pool across all categories came to $1 million, split across seven distinct awards: the $150,000 Shooting Star Award for standout early-stage companies, a matching $150,000 Scaling Star Award for growth-stage traction, the $150,000 Into New Worlds and Tech for Humanity awards for disruptive innovation and social impact, a $100,000 LEAP Landing Award for startups aiming to establish themselves in Saudi Arabia specifically, and a $50,000 People’s Choice Founder Award decided by the LEAP audience itself. The $250,000 LEAP Award Waspito won sat above every one of those, reserved specifically for the single most outstanding startup across the entire competition, judged across seven criteria spanning innovation, scalability, traction, societal impact, and the strength of the founding team.
Getting onto that stage at all required beating extraordinary odds. LEAP’s fifth edition drew more than 3,000 applications from startups worldwide, and only 100 made it through to the Rocket Fuel finals, flying in from markets including the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and several African countries beyond Cameroon. Waspito shared the final pitch lineup with companies like Ferveret, a US deep-tech company building sustainable cooling infrastructure for AI data centres, and Rology, a Saudi-headquartered teleradiology company using AI to speed up medical reporting, putting Waspito in direct competition with well-funded startups from considerably larger, better-resourced tech ecosystems and coming out on top anyway.
The room Waspito won that prize in wasn’t a symbolic stage either. LEAP 2026 pulled in 1,289 investors from 1,016 firms representing a combined $14.5 trillion in assets under management, and the event closed having generated $15 billion in technology deals on its very first day alone. Winning the top award in front of that specific audience carries weight well beyond the $250,000 cheque itself, putting Waspito directly in front of exactly the kind of global capital African health-tech startups have historically struggled to access at this scale.
Jean Lobe Lobe’s own reaction, posted directly to Facebook, captured what the win meant beyond the business case. “Years of building, sacrifice and refusing to quit brought us here,” he wrote, describing the moment as proof that African founders can build from the continent and genuinely compete with, and beat, the rest of the world. “We can build from Africa. We can compete with the world. And WE CAN WIN.”
For African health-tech specifically, a sector that has long argued its problems, from rural access to specialist care to the sheer logistics of connecting patients with providers across vast, unevenly served geographies, are genuinely hard and genuinely global-caliber problems to solve, Waspito’s win offers something harder to manufacture than funding alone: proof, on one of the industry’s biggest stages, that a health-tech company built and headquartered in Cameroon can be judged the best in the room against startups from anywhere else in the world.
