Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Nearpays Won the UN’s AI for Good Grand Finale—and why will.i.am Just Doubled the Stakes
The global technology ecosystem is saturated with elegant slide decks and theoretical whitepapers. But when the United Nations’ flagship startup acceleration platform gathers the world’s sharpest engineers, policymakers, and investors around a single question—What is AI actually for?—the answers that win are the ones built for the mud, noise, and realities of everyday human life.
At the 2026 AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, the jury delivered its definitive answer.
Nigerian financial technology pioneer Nearpays has been crowned the global winner of the AI for Good Innovation Factory Grand Finale. While securing the official $20,000 top cash prize from the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) was a massive milestone, the evening took an unprecedented turn. Tech entrepreneur, musician, and guest judge will.i.am was so captivated by the caliber of the finalists that he stood up and matched the UN’s prize funding completely out of his own pocket.
The surprise intervention effectively doubled Nearpays’ take-home capital to $40,000 and injected $20,000 each into the two runner-up health-tech finalists.
The Anatomy of a Global Breakthrough
The path to Geneva wasn’t an overnight sprint. Managed directly by the ITU, the AI for Good Innovation Factory operates as a rigorous, year-long filtering mechanism across multiple continents.
The platform connects early-stage builders with the regulatory frameworks, government networks, and technology ecosystems required to turn raw code into scalable public infrastructure. Nearpays earned its spot on the Geneva world stage by dominating the intense thematic and regional chapters months prior, proving its capability to solve systemic financial exclusion across the African continent.
The Winning Tech: What Makes Nearpays Different?
Traditional point-of-sale (POS) hardware is notoriously expensive to manufacture, distribute, and maintain, effectively locking informal merchants and micro-entrepreneurs out of the formal digital economy.
Nearpays resolves this barrier through an enterprise-grade SoftPOS solution.
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Hardware Dematerialization: The platform utilizes secure near-field communication (NFC) protocols to transform standard, low-cost smartphones into payment acceptance terminals with no external hardware add-ons required.
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Algorithmic Risk Layer: Beneath the transaction interface, Nearpays deploys real-time AI modeling to monitor payment anomalies, automate fraud detection, and parse incoming transactional flows.
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Automated Accounting Integrity: The integrated AI engine translates raw, unstructured cash-flow data into comprehensive business performance analytics. For millions of informal merchants who historically relied on unrecorded cash ledger systems, this continuous data capture builds a transparent, verified financial history. Over time, these records serve as an alternative credit-scoring blueprint, allowing small businesses to access commercial bank financing and working capital lines for the very first time.
The Geneva Ledger: Finalist Prize Breakdown
The climax of the 2026 Grand Finale highlighted the profound cross-sector diversity of this year’s cohort, prompting an unexpected, unilateral investment from the judge’s table.
| Startup Venture | Primary Focus Area | Core Technological Innovation | Total Capital Secured (USD) |
| Nearpays (Winner) | Financial Inclusion / FinTech | AI-driven SoftPOS smartphone checkout infrastructure. | $40,000 (UN Prize + will.i.am Match) |
| Doto Health (Finalist) | Healthcare / AI MedTech | Predictive diagnostic frameworks for public health management. | $20,000 (will.i.am Grant) |
| Nemocare Wellness (Finalist) | Neonatal Care / IoT Wearables | AI-powered vital monitoring systems for vulnerable infant care. | $20,000 (will.i.am Grant) |
Why This Validation Matters for Emerging Markets
The absolute core of the AI for Good philosophy isn’t about training massive, compute-heavy language models in isolated Silicon Valley server rooms. It’s about utility, accessibility, and high-impact deployment where the margin for error is razor-thin.
“AI is not just a tool; it’s humanity’s opportunity to solve global challenges at unprecedented scale.”
— Victor Daniyan, Founder and CEO of Nearpays
By honoring a startup that targets the foundational economic plumbing of informal trade, the United Nations and its ecosystem partners are signaling a permanent shift in tech validation. The ventures that matter most aren’t those generating flashy, theoretical demos; they are the resilient, data-driven teams engineering the actual infrastructure that connects real human lives to the global digital economy.
Who is Victor Daniyan?
Victor Daniyan’s journey to the United Nations global stage began not in a traditional financial institution, but at the intersection of corporate technology and real-world frontline friction. Before plunging into full-time entrepreneurship, Daniyan honed his technical and systems expertise at global telecom giants like Nokia and Huawei. The actual spark for Nearpays came from a hyper-practical headache he encountered while running his logistics company, Yourrider. He watched his dispatch riders continuously struggle to balance two separate devices: a smartphone for route navigation and a bulky, battery-draining, traditional POS terminal to collect payments. Realizing that an everyday mobile phone possessed all the native hardware needed to accept cards securely, he spent two intense years bootstrapping a proprietary, contactless SoftPOS architecture entirely out of his own pocket before gaining backing from major institutional players like Visa and Plug and Play Tech Center.
Today, Daniyan is widely recognized as one of the continent’s most intentional ecosystem builders, earning accolades as a Certified Management Consultant and a Forbes 30 Under 30 nominee. Interestingly, his vision spans far beyond digital wallets; through his sister venture, Yourrider Energies, he has partnered with the NNPC to deploy some of Nigeria’s earliest electric vehicle (EV) battery-swapping and charging stations. For Daniyan, artificial intelligence and fintech are not just mechanisms for chasing venture yields, but critical tools for community upliftment and macro nation-building. By focusing relentlessly on simplifying the onboarding and transactional realities of local market traders and informal small businesses, his work ensures that cutting-edge technology directly translates to human economic freedom.
To see him introduce the tech firsthand, you can watch this quick Victor Daniyan Pitch Spotlight, which captures his core presentation style and outlines how Nearpays scales uncollateralized financial access for African small businesses.
