Hi, welcome to Tech This Evening, an After-Work Tech Newsletter from Techparley Africa. Sure, there is a lot to unpack right now. Sit back, while I walk you through.
Top Story: OpenAI Acquires Healthcare Startup, Torch, in $100 Million Deal to Expand ChatGPT Health Features
OpenAI has acquired healthcare technology startup, Torch, with the startup’s team joining the company to enhance health and wellness features for ChatGPT, co-founder Ilya Abyzov said in a post on January 13.
Founded in 2024, Torch is led by founder and CEO Ilya Abyzov. The startup’s other co-founders include Eugene Huang, James Hamlin, and Ryan Oman. According to The Information, OpenAI paid approximately $100 million in equity for the company.
The Torch team will work with OpenAI to “build ChatGPT Health into the best AI tool in the world for health and wellness,” Abyzov said. The startup was originally designed as a platform to aggregate personal medical data from hospitals, laboratories, wearables, and consumer health services into a single, AI-readable system.
“We designed Torch to be a unified medical memory for AI, bringing every bit of data about you from hospitals, labs, wearables, and consumer testing companies into one place,” Abyzov said.
Other Tech News Stories You Should Read:
MoneyHash and Spare Partner to Enable Pay By Bank Payments for UAE Merchants. Read now.
Israeli Cyber Startup Torq Hits $1.2bn Valuation After $140m Raise to Scale AI Security Platform. Read now.
Kenyan Constantnople is Tackling Losses and Boosting Productivity with AI-Powered Fish Cages for Small-Scale Aquaculture. Read now.
On Startup Spotlight:
Singapore Startup, Zeya Health, Raises $575,000 to Build AI Infrastructure for Clinics Across Asia-Pacific
Zeya Health, a Singapore-based healthcare technology startup building artificial intelligence (AI)-native infrastructure for clinical providers, has raised US$575,000 in pre-seed funding from global early-stage investor Antler and a group of strategic angel investors.
The company said the funding will be used to accelerate product development and scale deployments across private healthcare providers in Singapore and the wider Asia-Pacific region, as demand rises for tools that help clinics manage growing patient volumes without expanding already stretched administrative teams.
Founded by former digital health operators Agastya Samat and Pasindu Wijesena, Zeya Health positions itself as a foundational AI layer for healthcare organisations, automating operational workflows while integrating directly into existing electronic medical record (EMR) systems and patient communication channels such as WhatsApp.
“We’ve both seen firsthand how care teams end up spending more time fighting systems than caring for patients. Whether it was deploying digital health systems at scale or watching clinics struggle with growing patient loads, the same issue kept coming up. We started Zeya to remove that bottleneck, so providers can grow without burning out their teams,” said Agastya Samat, Zeya Health’s Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.
Quadri Adejumo brings you all the details. Read here.
Also Read:
Mobility Startup, RoadMind AI is Betting on Hardware-Powered Intelligence to Fix Africa’s Dangerous Roads. Yakub Abdulrasheed brings us the details, here.
Quote of the Day:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
Thank you for joining me yet again this evening. Stay safe, and see you tomorrow for the next tech newsletter.
Best, Quadri
