Four medical students of the University of Benin (UNIBEN), Edo State, have been selected as finalists in the federal government’s student Venture Capital Grant (SVCG) initiative.
The students were shortlisted for their health-tech innovation, UpCare, a platform designed to reduce patient waiting times, improve access to healthcare services, and enable rapid retrieval of critical medical information, particularly during emergencies.
The UpCare team is led by Francis Nwabueze, alongside Ayebamiebi Yousuo, Osahon Onariase, and Daniel Itegboje.
The SVCG scheme, introduced in November 2025 in partnership with the Bank of Industry (BoI), is to provide up to N50 million in non-dilutive funding to student-led ventures that have reached the commercialisation stage.
The UNIBEN students are among 65 innovators selected from a pool of 30,639 applicants drawn from 404 tertiary institutions across the country to advance to the final stage of the programme.
The Federal Government described the initiative as a strategic investment in nurturing the next generation of innovators and job creators in Nigeria.
Currently in their sixth year of medical studies, the quartet developed UpCare as a patient-centred, decentralised digital health record system.
The platform allows individuals to own and manage a secure digital health identity, enabling their medical history to be continuously updated and accessed across multiple healthcare facilities.
According to TheCable, the innovation is meant to create a patient-owned digital health diary library, enhancing efficiency, continuity of care, and data accessibility within Nigeria’s he
althcare system.
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