We are pleased to announce our Hero Spotlight of the Month: Adriaan Kruger, ABH 2025 Top 10 Finalist and Co-Founder and CEO of nuvoteQ, a South African health-tech venture transforming how clinical research is conducted across the continent through its Electronic Research Record (ERR) solutions.
nuvoteQ's mission is to eliminate the inefficiencies of paper-based data collection in clinical research, replacing it with software that ensures data accuracy, patient safety, and efficient trial execution. Founded in 2014, the company started when Adriaan, then an Oracle software specialist, and his close friend Abraham van Wyk, a medical professional, resigned from their jobs to build it. Today, nuvoteQ's flagship platforms, Nukleus, Safetybase, and Kronus, are trusted by more than 400 research centres, manage over 1.5 million patient records, and serve more than 20,000 users across 40-plus countries spanning five continents.
What makes Adriaan's story compelling is the scale of the gap he set out to close. Clinical research is a $100 billion global industry, yet Africa receives only around 3 percent of that value. Adriaan's conviction is that closing even part of that gap through digitisation, shifting Africa's share from 3 percent toward 5 percent, would unlock transformative benefits for the continent's economy, skills base, and healthcare outcomes. nuvoteQ's software now supports clinical trials across Africa, Europe, and South America, all run out of Pretoria, with clients ranging from biotech startups to global pharmaceutical firms.
Beyond its commercial work, Adriaan and his colleagues established the not-for-profit nuvoteQ Foundation, dedicated to high-impact, Africa-centric projects, much of it focused on improving regulatory efficiency for African health authorities. The work is backed by international philanthropic partners, including the Gates Foundation and the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP). One of the Foundation's most ambitious current projects, built through nuvoteQ subsidiary Scigenix, tackles a backlog of more than 50,000 medicine registration dossiers, most of them for affordable generic drugs, stuck with South Africa's health products regulator, SAHPRA. Using an open-source large language model hosted on local servers to keep data in-country, the team trained a system to read through stacks of dossiers, including handwritten notes, cutting a review process that takes the regulator an average of two months down to roughly 45 minutes. The tool is set to go live in 2026, with the potential to get affordable medicines to patients far faster than before.
Adriaan's journey with Africa's Business Heroes was not a first attempt. He applied to the competition twice before being named a 2025 Top 10 Finalist in the HealthTech and Digital Solutions category, advancing from a pool of nearly 32,000 applications across the continent. At the 7th ABH Grand Finale in Kigali this past December, Adriaan and nuvoteQ were named second runner-up, earning a $150,000 grant. Reflecting on the experience, Adriaan said: "It is amazing being here. This was my second time applying to the competition. At first, I thought I couldn't go through the process again, but the ABH team was just incredible. I'm so glad I reapplied." He has since spoken about wanting to give back to the same community that backed him, adding that he is "a big supporter of the startup community" and hopes to help others, especially students and early-stage entrepreneurs, discover ABH and apply.
With nuvoteQ now eyeing new markets, deeper regulatory partnerships, and continued investment in AI-driven tools for African health systems, Adriaan's ambitions extend well beyond the company's own growth. His broader goal is to help build the digital infrastructure that allows Africa to capture more of the value of the global clinical research industry, attracting investment, creating skilled jobs, and accelerating the path of life-saving treatments to the patients who need them most.
Congratulations to Adriaan and the entire nuvoteQ team for their outstanding achievements in health-tech innovation, regulatory digitisation, and advancing clinical research across the continent.
To learn more visit:
https://www.nuvoteq.io
