In July 2026, Nigerian entrepreneur Victor Daniyan stood on a stage in Geneva and watched his company, Nearpays, become the first African startup ever to win the United Nations’ AI for Good Innovation Factory, a global competition run under the International Telecommunication Union that drew more than 500 international applications for its 2026 edition. It was the kind of moment that reads like the end of a story. For Daniyan, it was closer to a milestone in the middle of one.
A Win Big Enough to Get a Surprise Bonus
Nearpays claimed the grand prize at the Innovation Factory’s Grand Finale on July 11, part of the wider AI for Good Global Summit. The win came with a twist nobody on stage expected. Musician and longtime AI for Good voice will.i.am, added to the judging panel as a guest that day, closed the ceremony by telling all three finalists he was personally matching the competition’s $20,000 cash prize out of his own pocket. Nearpays left Geneva with $40,000 total, while fellow finalists Doto Health and Nemocare, both building AI tools in healthcare, each walked away with their own $20,000 from will.i.am’s surprise match. Beyond the money, the win carried real symbolic weight: previous editions of the Innovation Factory had crowned startups from other regions, including 2025’s winner, maternal-health AI venture MamaMate, making Nearpays’ victory the first time an African company had taken the competition’s top spot.
What Nearpays Actually Does
Strip away the awards and Nearpays solves a genuinely practical problem. It turns an ordinary smartphone into a fully functioning point-of-sale terminal using NFC technology, letting small businesses and informal merchants accept card and contactless payments without ever buying a traditional POS machine. For merchants operating on thin margins, that removes a real cost barrier standing between a cash-only business and one that can accept digital payments at all. The company says it now serves more than 60,000 SMEs and individuals and processes over 650,000 transactions a month, numbers that reflect years of unglamorous building rather than a single big break. Nearpays reportedly ran on bootstrapped capital for its first two years before securing outside investment from Visa, channelled through Silicon Valley accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, a vote of confidence from one of the biggest names in global payments.
Turning AI Into a Fraud-Fighting Tool
What sets Nearpays apart from a typical SoftPOS product is how deliberately it uses AI underneath the payment workflow, not just for processing transactions but for spotting the ones that look wrong. Daniyan has spoken directly about using the platform’s AI and security tools to detect suspicious activity and trace fraud attempts, framing this explicitly as a way to push back against increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled scams run by cybercriminals known across Nigeria as “Yahoo Boys.” That’s a genuinely timely angle. Interpol has separately reported that AI is helping cybercriminals scale their operations across Africa, making fraud schemes faster and harder to detect using conventional monitoring. Daniyan’s pitch is that giving legitimate merchants a traceable, harder-to-exploit payment rail does double duty: it protects the businesses using it while making the payment ecosystem a harder target for the fraud networks operating alongside it.
The Harder Parts of the Story
Daniyan’s path here wasn’t a straight line from idea to global stage. Before founding Nearpays, he built a technical foundation working at Nokia and Huawei, and studied at City University Kaduna. Building the company itself came with the kind of setback that rarely makes it into award announcements: Daniyan has described being stuck at an airport with a denied visa, unable to attend a major international pitch event he had spent months preparing for, a frustration familiar to plenty of African founders trying to access global capital and stages that weren’t originally built with their travel realities in mind. That he ended up winning one of those very stages years later is part of what makes the Geneva win land as more than just another award on a growing list.
A Second Bet on Clean Energy
Nearpays isn’t Daniyan’s only venture. Through Yourrider Energies, he has worked on building out electric mobility infrastructure in Nigeria, including one of the country’s first EV battery-swap and charging stations, which the company describes as developed in partnership with Nigeria’s national petroleum company, NNPC. That detail comes from Daniyan’s own materials rather than independent reporting reviewed for this piece, worth noting for readers who want to verify the specifics of that partnership directly. What’s clear regardless is the underlying bet: Daniyan is positioning himself across two of the infrastructure gaps most consistently cited as barriers to African economic growth, affordable digital payments and clean, reliable mobility, rather than staying narrowly focused on a single sector.
The Recognition Keeps Stacking Up
The Geneva win sits alongside a growing list of other recognitions. Daniyan was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 nominee in 2024, and Nearpays picked up a Best Fintech award at the inaugural GITEX Africa event in Morocco. He also holds a Certified Management Consultant designation, credentials that, taken together, paint a picture of someone building institutional credibility alongside product traction rather than relying on one or the other alone.
Why It’s Worth Watching
Daniyan’s story is a useful data point for a broader argument this publication keeps returning to: that some of the most consequential African tech companies are being built by founders solving specific, unglamorous, high-friction problems, the cost of a POS terminal, the reliability of an EV charging network, rather than chasing whatever category happens to be fashionable with investors that year. Winning a UN-backed global AI competition as the first African startup to do so is a genuine milestone. Whether Nearpays converts that visibility into deeper market penetration across Nigeria and beyond, and whether Yourrider Energies scales into a real piece of Africa’s electric mobility infrastructure, are the questions that will actually determine how this story gets told five years from now.
