Nikita Kuzmin, the Entrepreneur Who Decided Charity Shouldn’t Require Blind Trust

Nikita Kuzmin, a Dubai-based entrepreneur, wanted to give money away. He could not find a charity that could tell him where exactly that money would go.

About five years ago, after nearly two decades running businesses where every decision gets checked against a number, he did the math on the big international charities: a $10,000 gift into a $50 billion fund would change nothing he could see, and nothing would tell him what it had done.

So he wrote to small organizations in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, asking what they would do with his gift. Roughly 80 percent never replied. Some that did, answered: send the money, and we will work out what to do with it. Kuzmin was not satisfied with those answers.

“Charity is the only industry where ‘trust me’ is still an acceptable answer,” Kuzmin says.

He began designing his own. Nikita Kuzmin’s answer was Helpster Charity, founded in 2022. According to Kuzmin, Helpster pays for urgent medical care for children, young adults and pregnant women in Kenya, Nigeria and Bangladesh, in communities where free healthcare is unavailable. He says each payment goes straight to the hospital, and donors can track the cases they fund via Helpster’s app. Its website reports thousands of lives saved, at an average treatment cost of a few hundred dollars per case, with hundreds of children waiting. Kuzmin says that average is calculated by dividing total hospital bills by patients treated, and that the least expensive completed life-saving procedure the organization has funded was only $30. Kuzmin credits the organization with helping patients access life-saving treatment.

Today, Nikita Kuzmin wants to build his legacy from MENA, where he lives with his family and runs business interests.

A startup habit applied to charity

Kuzmin calls himself a parallel builder, running several ventures at once, each with a single “alpha” who holds final authority.

The habit he carried into giving was speed. “Startups don’t wait a year to find out if something’s working; they measure, adjust, and move,” he says. “I built Helpster the same way: if a process is slow, we fix it that week, not at the next annual review.”

How far a few hundred dollars go 

The first test was small. Kuzmin says his team paid several patients’ bills directly to Nigerian hospitals and observed their recovery. Children were dying of conditions routinely survivable elsewhere, such as a ruptured appendix, because a family was a few hundred dollars short.

“Nobody should be dying because they do not have a few hundred dollars,” Kuzmin says. His long-term goal is more than a million children’s lives saved.

“Scale in charity has always meant one thing: your dollar disappears into someone else’s number,” Nikita Kuzmin says. His version: whether a gift is thirty dollars or thirty thousand, “you see exactly what it did.”

Trust, engineered for impact at scale

Helpster runs through three linked nonprofits: Helpster Charity US Inc., a 501(c)(3); Helpster Charity Europe, registered in Estonia; and Helpster Charity Nigeria. They share a platform and verification standards. In each country, a doctor with a public-health background and a group of volunteers and country managers lead the work.

Kuzmin says every case is checked before funds are released. It must come from a trusted source, such as a partner hospital or vetted local nonprofit. A volunteer visits the family’s home, an in-house doctor confirms the medical record with the hospital, and an algorithm cross-checks the data, benchmarks the cost against regional averages, and ranks cases by urgency. A person makes the final call.

Not everything transfers: a deadline-and-KPI culture fits poorly in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, the team says.

Why MENA, and why now?

Nigeria is where Helpster began, and Africa remains its center of gravity. For Nikita Kuzmin, being based in Dubai matters because a model built on local partners, doctors and in-person checks works better from nearby.

Nikita Kuzmin says the next milestone is 10,000 lives saved. Entering a new country requires no free national healthcare, government permission, local registration and reliable local doctors. As in every business that he runs, Kuzmin approaches each potential market for Helpster through an entrepreneurial lens: making decisions on how responsive the local communities, regulators and public health professionals are. 

What he wants to leave behind

Nikita Kuzmin hopes “to set the standard of what charitable giving looks like,” and measures that less by Helpster’s size than by whether other organizations start answering where each gift went.

His message to founders: if you can measure a product launch, you can measure a gift. Business, he says, has given entrepreneurs far more than they have given back. “Doing good should be systemic,” Kuzmin says, “and the technology built for business should work just as well for saving lives.”