At 16, Asanato Mayor is building four digital products from Jos, Plateau State, and not from Lagos. He works alone, he is still in secondary school, and he says he taught himself to code. His goal is a company called Mayor Group, and it has no team yet beyond him.
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He started at 13 with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. His tutors were ChatGPT and Gemini. “Nobody taught me. I learnt it myself, and ChatGPT and Gemini were my tutors,” he told Technext. His mother gave him his first lessons on computers and the internet. His school has a computer lab, he says, but he did not learn to code there.
Mayor wants his company to be built around people his own age. He plans to build for, and work with, young people under 18. His aim is for Mayor Group to become one of the best-known startups owned by a team under 18, in Nigeria, Africa or anywhere in the world. For now, that team is only him.
There is a legal step he has not taken yet. Mayor Group is not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). He says his age is the obstacle, and that he will register through his parents once money starts coming in. Index Prima has not checked the CAC rules on this, so treat that as his account. Founders in a similar position should ask the CAC or a lawyer directly.
His four products are at very different stages, as the table shows.
| Product | What it does | Status as he describes it |
|---|---|---|
| Notice | An online notice board. Creators post a notice and share it with a QR code. Anyone can scan and view it for free. | Launched earlier, now suspended while he fixes issues. No users yet. |
| Mivo AI | A chatbot with a normal mode and an educational mode that helps students study, such as walking through quadratic equations. | Not launched. He expects a release in the first week of 2027. |
| Zango | A social network for neighbours, inspired by Nextdoor. It uses location to place people in groups for their area. | Expected launch between 18 and 23 October 2026. |
| Zeero | A marketplace and job board for beginners. It does not handle payments, so buyers and sellers agree terms in a chat and pay outside the app. | No launch date. |
A few details stand out. Mivo AI runs on an engine he built, called the Miano Series, which draws on APIs from other AI providers. Zango uses an AI moderator, named Obsidian Cluster, that gives strikes for abuse or obscene content. It removes a user after 10 strikes, with a human review for appeals. Zeero is meant for people with no experience. “LinkedIn and Upwork ask for too much. I wanted something a beginner with no experience can just walk into,” he says.
The company has changed names several times: Asacorp, Asterix, Maytech and now Mayor Group. He explains the last change simply. “Maytech would have limited us to tech. Mayor is my name, and group means a chain of industries.” He says it will start with technology and move into physical businesses later. The Mayor Group website backs up the name history, which it dates to 2023, and it describes Mivo AI as the flagship product in the first phase of production. It does not mention the other three products.
His road has had setbacks. From age 12 he sold AI-generated designs, but says several clients did not pay him. At 14 he built Rivol, an app to connect builders under 18. It closed after almost a year because it never attracted users or funding. The lesson he took from that period is blunt: “People won’t help you unless you have proof or money.”
What can other founders take from this? First, he shipped, then learned from what failed. Second, he picked a clear audience, which is beginners and young people. Third, he is honest about what is not ready: one product is suspended, one has no date, and one has no users. Investors and partners tend to trust that kind of candour. The hard parts are still ahead, including real users, a legal structure and revenue. His launch dates are his own targets, and we could not confirm any of them independently.
His advice to young builders outside the big cities is short. “Never give up. If Mark Zuckerberg had given up, we wouldn’t have Facebook.”
Sources: Technext profile of Asanato Mayor by Epiphanus Obia; Mayor Group website.
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