Anita Ugwuru was in the audience for the first episode of Pitche Friday, watching five founders take the stage in Makurdi and thinking that should be me. This Friday, August 14, it is. Ugwuru’s EarnVersity is one of five startups pitching at Pitch Friday S1E2, the second instalment of a young pitch series run by BenueTech at BAIHUB in Makurdi — a small but telling sign that Benue State’s tech scene is starting to generate its own momentum rather than borrowing it from Lagos or Abuja.
Who’s Pitching
The lineup spans five very different sectors, but nearly all of it is rooted in Benue itself. **OmniNile / LumiID**, founded by Emmanuel Nzorov out of Gboko, is building an AI-powered live identity verification platform already generating revenue — a direct response to identity fraud that costs Nigerian businesses millions each year. **Sheltrify AI**, co-founded by Awua Biemdoo, is building an AI-driven real estate intelligence platform meant to bring trust and transparency to a property market plagued by fake listings and agent exploitation. **Matchire**, from Raphael Emmanuel and Odoh Samuel Itodo, is trying to make Nigerian hotel booking as simple as sending a WhatsApp message — no app download, no friction. **Foodra**, built by Aondongu Amos, Clement Raymond, and Mimi Andzenge, is developing a digital agri-marketplace aimed at connecting Benue’s smallholder farmers — the backbone of a state that feeds much of the country — with the market access, financing, and support they currently lack. And **EarnVersity**, Ugwuru’s own venture with co-founder Precious Ukama, connects university students with flexible jobs and practical digital skills, a female-led answer to a problem every Nigerian student recognises.
Lineup That Reads Like Benue’s Own Economy
What’s notable about this set of five isn’t just that they’re mostly Makurdi-based — it’s how directly each one maps onto a problem specific to the region it comes from. A state whose identity as Nigeria’s “food basket” runs deep gets an agritech startup built around smallholder farmers. A rapidly urbanising state capital gets a real-estate trust platform. A population of students with limited local job infrastructure gets an edtech-meets-gig-work platform built by a student herself. It’s a lineup that looks less like generic startup ideas dropped into a random city, and more like problems specific enough to Benue that they’d be hard to build convincingly from anywhere else.
The Ecosystem Behind the Stage
Pitch Friday isn’t a one-off — it’s part of BenueTech’s broader push to, in the organisation’s own words, build a thriving, globally recognised tech ecosystem in Benue State by supporting startups founded by Benue indigenes, pairing founders with mentors, and connecting them to investors and the wider tech community. The event sits alongside BenueTech’s other programming, including an annual Demo Day pitch competition and regular community sessions aimed at students and career-switchers. That this is already “Season 1, Episode 2” — with a founder who attended the first episode now pitching at the second — suggests the format is doing what it’s meant to: turning spectators into participants.
The Details
Pitch Friday S1E2 runs from 2:00 to 4:00 PM WAT on Friday, August 14, at BAIHUB in Bencedi, Makurdi. Registration is open at apps.maxifytickets.com/discover/pitch-friday-s1e2.
Why It’s Worth Watching
None of these five startups are likely to show up in a continental funding roundup any time soon — they’re early, local, and building for a market that rarely gets covered outside of it. That’s precisely why they’re worth noting. Nigeria’s tech story has been told almost entirely through Lagos for the better part of a decade; a recurring pitch series in Makurdi, feeding founders and mentorship back into the same regional ecosystem episode after episode, is a small but real data point in a different version of that story starting to take shape.
