Buying medical aid or funeral cover in Zimbabwe usually starts with a face-to-face meeting and often takes several more to actually finish. A customer has to find an agent, explain what they need, compare products, and sit through round after round of discussion before making a decision. Dennis Chirinda, a South Africa-based Zimbabwean entrepreneur, thinks that process is broken in a specific, fixable way, and he’s built MedLifeSure, an AI-powered platform under his company Arkvest, to prove it.
The Bias Problem Sitting at the Centre of His Pitch
Chirinda’s critique of the traditional model goes beyond simple inefficiency. He points to a structural conflict of interest baked into how insurance gets sold in Zimbabwe: human sales agents are limited by the geographic areas they can realistically cover, and properly equipping them to reach customers in distant areas gets expensive fast. More pointedly, he argues that agent advice can end up biased in practice, because an agent’s own incentive is to maximise commissions, not necessarily to steer a customer toward the coverage that actually fits their needs. That’s a sharper claim than the usual “insurance is complicated” framing, and it’s the real premise MedLifeSure is built to test: that removing a commission-driven human from the first stage of the buying decision can produce a better match for the customer, not just a faster one.
How MedLifeSure Actually Works
The platform uses algorithmic and AI features to match customers with medical aid and funeral plan products based on information the customer provides directly, indicating which products they’re likely to qualify for before a human ever enters the conversation. It’s not a fully self-service checkout yet, customers who find a product that fits can request a callback to complete onboarding with a qualified product adviser, so there’s still a human touchpoint at the closing stage. The platform supports both individual customers and group purchases, and Chirinda has said the longer-term goal is for the system to eventually finalise transactions entirely on its own, removing the human handoff altogether once trust in the automated matching is established.
Where the Idea Actually Came From
Chirinda’s thinking was shaped directly by time spent in the United States as a 2025 Mandela Washington Fellow at the University of Iowa, where he got exposure to the accelerator programmes supporting insurtech innovation there. What struck him wasn’t just the technology itself, but how quickly ideas like MedLifeSure get picked up and tested in real environments by larger insurers in more mature markets, a feedback loop that keeps pushing the industry to adapt rather than let a good idea sit untested for years.
The Real Obstacle Isn’t Customers, It’s Insurers
The harder problem MedLifeSure faces isn’t convincing Zimbabweans to try a new way of shopping for insurance, it’s convincing the insurers themselves to plug into the platform at all. Chirinda has been candid that onboarding insurers is the single biggest challenge, describing bureaucratic internal processes and real skepticism toward insurtech that makes product information easily comparable in the open market. He points to a specific cultural pattern in the medical aid industry especially: benefits and rates are often deliberately kept opaque, hidden from easy comparison rather than published for customers to weigh against competitors. A platform explicitly built to make that information transparent and comparable is, in a real sense, asking incumbents to give up a competitive advantage built on customers not being able to shop around easily.
The Bigger Stake Behind the Business Case
Chirinda frames the opportunity in terms that go beyond his own company’s growth. Zimbabwe’s health insurance coverage currently sits at around just 8% of the population, and he believes broader adoption of insurtech tools like MedLifeSure could meaningfully move that number, by making it easier and cheaper to reach customers that traditional agent networks simply can’t cover economically.
Where Things Actually Stand
Arkvest is currently in negotiations with potential partners in Zimbabwe and South Africa, including Ecosure Health and Momentum Health, with Chirinda describing both as showing strong interest and negotiations as being at an advanced stage. Neither deal has been finalised yet, which is worth being clear about, advanced-stage talks are a meaningful signal of momentum, not a signed partnership. His longer-term ambition extends past matching customers to existing products entirely: building AI infrastructure that helps insurers assess local risk more efficiently using real data, which could in turn let them design products that actually respond to the specific needs of different customer segments, rather than offering the same generic coverage to everyone regardless of circumstance.
