THE MOVE
On 15 July 2025 — a Nigerian public holiday — Reliance Health told 106 people across support, sales, marketing and operations that their jobs were gone, with a final working date of 18 July. Only the product and technology teams were spared. The company framed it plainly: a 'company-wide workforce reduction aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability of the business and supporting our immediate goal of achieving breakeven this quarter.' Severance was one month's salary plus notice pay, and even that was made conditional on a satisfactory last appraisal.
The cut is the sharp end of a strategic reversal. Reliance Health is the Y Combinator-backed Lagos company that, in February 2022, raised a $40 million Series B led by General Atlantic — at the time the largest healthtech round in African history, with Partech, Tencent, Picus Capital, AAIC and others alongside. That capital was raised to expand: to build clinics in Abuja and Port Harcourt, to court the Nigerian diaspora, and above all to replicate the model beyond Nigeria. It opened a Cairo office in late 2022, then added Senegal and an undisclosed African market in 2024, each time signing leases, hiring country managers and constructing provider networks from scratch.
The 2024-26 bet is the opposite of the 2022 bet. Instead of buying growth with investor money across three geographies, Reliance Health has pulled back to force its Nigerian core into profitability. Ex-employees say sales outside Nigeria — Egypt especially — came in softer than expected, and the layoffs read as a reckoning with the limits of that international push. This is the move MonoKromatik is grading: not a product launch, but a deliberate contraction — a company that scaled on foreign capital now betting it can stand on its own unit economics.
It matters because Reliance Health was the poster child. It was the proof-of-concept that an African startup could take the vertically integrated payer-provider model — sell affordable HMO cover to employers, then serve members through owned clinics and a contracted network — and scale it across markets. If the poster child has to retrench to survive, the question is no longer whether the model works. It is whether the model can be funded by anything other than the next round.