Osahon Okunbo
Vetrinox describes the investment as part of a shift toward companies with commercially viable solutions to social and economic problems
Nigerian businessman Osahon Okunbo has made his family office’s first American healthcare investment, backing a Seattle company that uses artificial intelligence to run cancer clinics.
Vetrinox Capital announced the investment in Hurone AI on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The amount was not disclosed.
Okunbo is the eldest son of Captain Idahosa Wells Okunbo, the Nigerian billionaire and commercial pilot who built interests across oil and gas, agriculture, real estate, power and telecoms before his death in London in August 2021 at 63. His sister is Olori Atuwatse III, queen of the Warri Kingdom.
He runs Vetrinox from Lagos and has been building a portfolio distinct from what he inherited. It spans energy, agriculture, hospitality and the creative economy across Nigeria and other African markets, and he separately serves as executive director of Pipeline Infrastructure Nigeria, chairman of The Wells Carlton hotel in Abuja, and founder of Live! Lounge, a Lagos comedy and live performance club. He took his degree at the University of Southampton.
What he has bought into is software that answers patients’ messages.
Hurone AI’s platform, called Hurona, plugs into Epic, the electronic health record system most large American hospitals run on, and automates clinical workflows, patient navigation and social risk assessment. Its deployment at the University of California San Francisco’s Brain Tumor Center analysed more than 225,000 patient interactions involving 845 patients, and the company says 75% of neuro-oncology messages were resolved without a clinician touching them.
That matters commercially as well as clinically. The platform also automates the billing codes attached to oncology navigation, which turns work hospitals already do into revenue they can claim, while reducing the administrative load that drives doctors out of the profession.
The company has been collecting the credentials enterprise hospitals require. It has licensed the Mayo Clinic’s HOUSES framework for measuring social determinants of health, holds an A+ independent cybersecurity rating, and integrates natively with Epic.
Its founder is Nigerian. Dr Kingsley Ndoh runs Hurone AI as chief executive and said the investment came at a pivotal moment of scaling, and that capital from people who understand the mission is paramount as the platform deploys across top-tier academic research centres.
Okunbo put it in more personal terms. Cancer is fought in the hours no one sees, he said, and in the questions no one can bring themselves to ask, and Ndoh is building the thing that sits with people in those hours. He added that he had wanted something like it to exist for a long time.
The company says its purpose is to stop a patient’s location or income determining the quality of cancer care they receive.
