In 2024, Thierry Tchio ’25 found himself carrying sensitive lab results between a primary care center and an advanced diagnostic center in Accra because the two facilities’ electronic systems could not communicate with each other.
That experience exposed a larger problem than inconvenience: in many African contexts, digital health systems exist, but they do not reliably support continuity of care. This became the starting point for nBogne (pronounced “bo-gey”), a health-tech venture Tchio is now building with an early focus in his native Cameroon.
nBogne is designed as a cellular-first data transmission layer that helps health information move between facilities even where reliable broadband is unavailable. The system uses USSD and SMS to transmit medical records through existing cellular networks, allowing data to move when internet-based systems are unavailable, incompatible, or offline.
“I found that we needed homegrown solutions that would work on the infrastructure available,” he said.
The reality is that fewer than 35% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s nearly 100,000 health facilities have reliable broadband. That is not background context. It is a design constraint. The solution began as a response to one frustrating experience. Since then, it has grown into an effort to solve the broader systems challenge of making health information move more reliably across fragmented care environments.
Now part of the second cohort of the health track in the Ashesi Venture Incubator (AVI), Tchio is building nBogne while working full-time as a data analyst at a Big Four accounting firm in Accra and coordinating a distributed team of software engineers across borders. His co-founder, Alma, is based in the United States and brings experience working on digital health systems in Cameroon, where the venture is concentrating its early work.
“It’s not easy launching from afar,” Tchio said.
That distance shapes the venture in practical ways. Neither founder is currently based in Cameroon, making it harder to observe product use directly during testing. A small network of collaborators supports the early pilot phase, helping the team understand how the system fits into existing workflows. For now, those pilots remain limited in scale and are intended to inform development rather than full deployment.
The venture is also contending with the pressures that often shape early-stage health innovation. Two earlier co-founders stepped away as the demands of the work became clearer. Licensing remains unresolved. Certification and integration into government systems still lie ahead. Tchio estimates that building a scalable, production-ready prototype and carrying out an initial deployment could require as much as $50,000. And yet, momentum is building.
nBogne is currently in a test pilot phase with a small number of hospitals and health centers, while the team engages prospective institutional users, including research institutions, private hospitals, and electronic medical record providers. The founders are also fundraising, fully aware that health ventures in Africa often move at the pace of infrastructure, regulation, and trust.
Tchio sees this as simply part of the work. Progress depends on product design and navigating infrastructure on one hand, and regulation and adoption on the other.
“If we need to pivot, we will,” he said. “We’ve already done that more than 10 times in the health space over the last two years.”
Being part of AVI has helped him sharpen both the product and the assumptions behind it. Working with coaches has pushed him to think more rigorously about what the venture is solving and what it will take to make it viable. He also credits Ashesi with shaping the mindset he now brings to entrepreneurship.
What Tchio is building is not a solution for ideal conditions. It is an attempt to make compatibility more possible in the systems that already exist. If nBogne succeeds, it could reduce the burden on patients and help providers exchange information in ways that better support continuity of care across fragmented health systems.
For now, the work remains early, but Tchio is building with a clear conviction: that solutions grounded in local realities stand a better chance of working than those designed for conditions that do not exist.
