A primary factor keeping Nigeria’s insurance penetration rate below 1% is the severe friction in retail distribution. For the average consumer or small business owner, navigating traditional insurance policies means dealing with slow manual paperwork, opaque underwriting terms, and fragmented coverage models. This high structural friction has historically isolated millions of viable risks from formal protection pools, limiting the overall growth of the insurance sector.
To remove these distribution bottlenecks, licensed insurtech platform Myka has closed its pre-seed funding round.
Backed by a coalition of elite institutional tech funds and angel investors, the capital injection will be used to scale the startup’s digital brokerage infrastructure. The platform aims to move retail and small-medium enterprise ($\text{SME}$) risk mitigation onto a single, automated digital environment.
The Capital Pool: Strategic Backing from Ecosystem Builders
The financing round, completed on June 10, 2026, features a strong lineup of pan-African venture firms and prominent tech operators. The investor pool includes:
-
Institutional Funds: Ventures Platform and TLcom Capital, two of the continent’s most active early-stage venture capital firms specializing in scalable infrastructure software.
-
Angel Investors: Prominent Nigerian tech founders including Shola Akinlade (Co-founder, Paystack), Ridwan Olalere (Co-founder, LemFi), and Olumide Soyombo (Co-founder, Voltron Capital).
The involvement of these specific investors points to a strategic interest in building out missing financial infrastructure. By backing a platform capable of aggregating highly fragmented insurance options, these investors are supporting a more unified approach to digital financial services.
The Product Architecture: Real-Time Risk Aggregation
Founded in 2025 by veteran serial entrepreneur Sim Shagaya (Founder of Konga, uLesson, and Miva Open University) alongside co-founders Muritala Ahmed and Oluwadamilola Okenla, Myka functions as a licensed digital insurance broker.
The startup’s platform operates as a multi-tenant comparison engine:
-
Discovery and Aggregation: Users log in to search across an expansive registry of third-party insurance products, covering health, vehicle, property, and business indemnity lines.
-
Real-Time Comparison: The platform’s algorithms automatically evaluate policy premiums, deductible requirements, and coverage limits side by side.
-
Instant Purchasing: Users can purchase and activate policies instantly through integrated payment gateways, replacing the weeks-long onboarding process typical of traditional brokerages.
The Macro Outlook for Insurtech Capitalization
Myka’s early-stage capital raise comes at a time when financial regulators like the National Insurance Commission ($\text{NAICOM}$) are actively looking for digital solutions to boost national insurance numbers.
While mobile banking and digital peer-to-peer transfers have achieved high adoption rates across Nigeria, insurtech has lagged behind due to complex legacy compliance requirements and fragmented insurance carrier networks.
By building unified API bridges between traditional insurance companies and mobile-first consumers, Myka is creating a more scalable distribution model. As the startup uses its new capital to expand its carrier network, it is well-positioned to turn insurance into an easily accessible digital product—helping protect small businesses from sudden operational losses and advancing wider financial inclusion goals across the country.
