What do you get when ambition and youthful exuberance meet challenges with actionable solutions?
No longer waiting till graduation to make a mark in the world, student innovators are developing a myriad of solutions to tackle real-world challenges. Some of these student owned startups focus on accelerating emergency medical response and others, on digitising the voting process.
The student-led startups profiled below tackle problems across many sectors, showing how technology continues to address systemic challenges Nigerians grapple with daily.
Precision Health: Accurate diagnosis, made easy
(Healthtech, University of Lagos)
Eniola Alex, a student of the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, is behind Precision Health, a platform that seeks to combine AI technology with medical expertise to help healthcare providers triage faster. The product is inspired by his personal experience. Alex spent eight months in the ICU battling Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a rare disorder where the immune system attacks nerves, causing weakness or paralysis. His gruelling four-year recovery exposed the pitfalls of trial-and-error healthcare, inspiring a mission to take away the guesswork from medicine.
Currently, Precision Health is offering its triage tools to Nigeria’s skincare market, allowing users to connect with a slew of dermatologists who consult and recommend treatment virtually. The platform merges dermatologists’ expertise with AI tools analysing skin type, climate, and user data to deliver personalised, medical-grade recommendations.
Precision Health trains its AI model with an archive of over 1500 data sources of African skin type. Following its launch in January 2025, the platform has since garnered up to 300 users on its waitlist and partnered with Lagos-based Aesthetic Medical Central. Precision Health earns money through consultation commissions and personalised product kits.
Carrely: Learning made fun
(Edtech, University of Lagos)
Carrely, a social, gamified, and AI-powered learning platform, is the brainchild of Lawrence Eniola, a 200-level computer engineering student. Carrely was born out of a frustration with traditional online learning platforms, which he found more like a necessary inconvenience rather than fulfilling.
Drawing inspiration from more engaging learning platforms like Duolingo, Eniola developed Carrely to make learning more fun than a chore. With Carrely, students can engage in discussions, challenge each other in quizzes, and earn badges as they progress through levels. This platform incorporates AI models to give explanations and smart recommendations that help users learn at their own pace, and cloud storage services for ease in sharing PDFs.
Carrely intends to be the go-to platform for social learning, helping students retain knowledge better by tying learning to more social kinds of interaction. Although Carrely is still in its pre-launch stage, the platform is on the lookout for early-stage investors as it is currently bootstrapped, according to the founder. It intends to generate revenue through a mix of in-app targeted advertising and premium subscriptions that unlock additional features for users.
Smooth Ballot: Elections, digitised
(Services, University of Ibadan)
University student Prince Ogbonna came upon the idea for an e-voting platform after participating in a campus election and collating paper ballots manually. This election software, available as a web app, includes features that enable individuals to create elections and allow voters to cast their ballots. Ideated in 2023 and launched in September of the following year, Smooth Ballot has partnered with 12 associations, including the Cinema Exhibitors Association of Nigeria (CEAN) and, more recently, Silverbird Group for their upcoming beauty pageant – Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria (MBGN).
According to the founder, Smooth Ballot prioritises speed, access to a dashboard regardless of server issues, unique voters’ emails and passwords, and security protocols to avoid disenfranchisement. It also includes a feature that allows administrators to send out accreditation forms to the electorate. This platform generates revenue by charging organisations per number of voters onboarded (for political elections) and collecting a 20% commission from paid contest voting.
Unlike other e-voting platforms, Smooth Ballot is not limited to political elections and allows organisations to set up elections themselves.
Valor: AI that detects mango problems.
(Agritech, Caleb University)
Three final-year computer science students, Chibuzor Nwachukwu, Harmony Abayomi, and Freda Efod, developed this platform that combines AI, computer vision, and learning models to detect mango ripeness and check for diseases, including anthracnose and stem rot.
With love for mangoes, agriculture, and a disdain for food waste, these three are on a path to use tech to solve an agricultural problem of crop wastage and loss. The platform allows users to scan the image of the fruit or select one from their gallery, and use the available AI model to check predictions.
Although still in its development stage, these founders intend to make Valor into a web and app-based platform, which can be accessed online for farmers in environments with poor technological infrastructure. The platform has seen no investors; however, they claim to receive tremendous support from their departmental stakeholders. They intend to make access to the service subscription-based, which will form the majority of their revenue. They have used over 1,700 mango datasets in training their AI model to make accurate predictions.
Quata: Your AI DevOps teammate
(Services, University of Lagos)
Quata is an AI engineer who helps product teams set up their software delivery pipelines and keep their production environments secure. It is an AI teammate that takes the actions of a mid-level cloud/DevOps engineer, so other team members can focus on their core tasks.
Developed by Haruna Faruk (Physics, 200 level) and David Mark (Computer Science, 400 level), Quata intends to solve the problem of the technical and time-consuming nature of managing cloud computing infrastructure, which includes the difficult process of deploying software from Africa. The founders noted that there wasn’t a modern or reliable solution to this problem. Quata AI integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud to provide computer resources that track logs for analysis. Quata is set to publicly launch by June 2025.
CourseQR: Shortcut to smarter studying
(Edtech, University of Lagos)
This startup was developed in 2023 by Fashoranti Olanrewaju, a student of pharmacy, who’d always found the process of learning and accessing course materials in Nigerian universities outdated. Olarenwaju noted that study materials often come in a disorganised manner from the lecturers, leading to frustration and an ineffective learning experience.
In his passion to build working problem-solving products, he turned bulky slides and the tedious studying process into CourseQR, a learning platform where students can access their course materials and study aids, including notes, quizzes, and flashcards, to study effectively.
The web app is built on AI and locally hosted LLMs. CourseQR currently operates in the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, with over 200 students onboarded, and a vision of expanding to other universities. This service is currently free.
UniBeta: Your campus in your pocket
(Edtech, University of Lagos)
“University isn’t just about academics, it’s about growth in every aspect of life.” These were the thoughts on Adeola Oluwadamilare’s mind when he and Onigbanjo Oluwaseun co-founded UniBeta in 2023, a super app that students can use for class scheduling and Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) tracking, connecting tutors, and career tips, with a marketplace for campus vendors.
UniBeta offers support for career development, networking, and financial opportunities while fostering a sense of community. The mobile application contains features including class scheduling and project creation, assignment tracker, marketplace for student vendors, tutorial videos and materials, finding tutors, and CGPA calculator. This mobile application integrates APIs to achieve its features, including ChatGPT4 and payment gateways.
The platform charges weekly and monthly subscription fees for as low as ₦0 to as high as ₦3,000. It currently has almost 700 subscribers, 230 vendors in the marketplace, and over 4000 student members.
Waraja: Africa to the world
(E-commerce, University of Lagos)
Waraja started as a student e-commerce platform that connects student entrepreneurs on campus to their customers. This business stemmed from student entrepreneur Tioluwani Bamigboye’s inability to connect with her buyers. In time, Waraja has expanded beyond campus to become a platform specifically for ‘Made in Africa’ products. Its goal is to export these locally made products globally.
According to the founder, Waraja exists to develop trust in African-made products, shunning rumours of the subpar quality of locally made products. As it is in its MVP stage of development, it has had up to 300 interactions with vendors and customers alike. In developing a business model to match competitors like Jumia and Konga, Waraja intends to only chase down investors when it is MVP-ready. Waraja also plans to launch a logistics chain with electricity-powered bikes to reduce carbon emissions.
ParaLearn: All-in-one school management, simplified
(Services, University of Ibadan)
ParaLearn is a cloud-based AI school management software that enables academic administrators to manage their schools from the comfort of their smart devices. Management activities range from admissions, teaching and learning, assessments, results computation, and analysis of students and staff information. It is an end-to-end solution for school administrators to manage their schools.
The inspiration for this platform stemmed from the dreadful experience of reading the wrong course materials for an examination by the founder, Evander Ikechuckwu. Established in 2019 by Evander Ikechukwu, ParaLearn has three core features: a learning management system, a result management system, and a student and staff information system. These features are combined to make school administrators run their schools effectively and improve the learning experience of students.
ParaLearn integrates AI in its operations by training LLM with the African education curricula. This means that given the right prompt, the AI will tailor content to WAEC, NECO, or JAMB curricula. Drawing inspiration from Google Docs’ offline editing feature, ParaLearn enables users to manage activities on their dashboard and then synchronize the changes when they connect to an internet source.
According to the founder, ParaLearn, like its international competitor, Blackboard, is built for Africans as Africans and Foreigners do not interact with technology the same way. The platform charges institutions based on the number of students they onboard.
MEDWAKA: Rapid emergency response, made accessible
(Healthtech, University of Ibadan)
MEDWAKA provides a fast, reliable, and accessible emergency medical response system to significantly reduce mortality rates in medical emergencies. It was developed by Rest Essence in 2021.
The web platform provides real-time guidance on first aid and emergency response, ensuring timely and effective care. MEDWAKA is tackling the pain of slow/no response times during medical emergencies and is providing people with a solution they can rely on. Leveraging AI, this platform is integrated with GPS tracking, ensuring seamless coordination and information sharing between patients, first care responders, and hospitals. A mobile application is still in development.
It has seen 30 users since its inception and has applied for various grant-awarding competitions, including The Fishbowl Challenge. It generates revenue by taking commissions from provided medical services, like ambulance services, and is currently pursuing partnerships with Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) to unburden users from the payment of services.
Haze Couture: AI-driven 3D body scans for smarter shopping
(Services, Covenant University)
Founded by Joshua Ajonye, a Computer Science student, Haze is leveraging the power of AI to convert 3D pictures of users into 3D models of them. These generated 3D models enable the extraction of their body measurements to be applied when buying clothing items online.
Haze addresses one of the biggest pain points in online clothing shopping – purchasing outfits that don’t fit. Haze’s technology enables access to user measurements, which solves the problem of sizing when clothing shopping online. It also allows users to see exactly how the outfit will look on them, and how it complements their skin colour and body type. Haze has started completely bootstrapped and turned down angel investors to ensure long-term value. According to the founder, the goal of Haze is to join the ranks of Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft as a Fortune 500 company.
Naijournal: Telling Nigeria’s story, one video at a time
(Media, University of Lagos)
Naijournal combines storytelling with technology to properly tell Nigerian stories, especially about their past through carefully crafted videos.
The motivation for this startup came with the realisation that storytelling shapes perception, and Naijournal could undo the negative perceptions that the mainstream media has cast on Nigeria. Founders Ekpagha Runor and Abiola Feranmi want Naijournal to step up as culture custodians – a platform dedicated to preserving our history and amplifying our achievements. Their major platform of operation is YouTube.
XRNet: Bringing clarity to e-commerce with AR, VR & 3D
(Services, University of Lagos)
Founded in 2022, XRNet was developed to build confidence in the e-commerce ecosystem. After witnessing several ‘what I ordered vs what I got’ cases, David Mustapha founded XRNet to solve that problem by providing a real-time view of products.
The platform allows businesses to create a storefront where customers can interact with their products using Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and 3D technology, before making a purchase. XRNet saw over 50 sign-ups during the first month of its launch.
The platform currently has over 55 SMEs utilising its immersive AR/3D online web and mobile stores, and generates revenue through commissions on purchases and subscription plans from storefront users. This project has received funding from incubators, including Innovation to Market and the Tony Elumelu Foundation, garnering up to ₦6.5 million ($42,245) in funding.
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