A Lagos SoftPOS Startup Just Beat 88 Countries in Geneva — And Won $40,000, Not $20,000
Nearpays, an Abuja-based fintech that turns smartphones into card readers, won the UN's AI for Good Innovation Factory 2026 in Geneva on July 9 — then musician will.i.am doubled its prize on the spot.
Twenty thousand dollars was the number on the program. Forty thousand is what Nearpays actually left Geneva with.
The Abuja-based fintech, which turns ordinary smartphones into card-payment terminals for small merchants, won the AI for Good Innovation Factory 2026 Grand Finale on July 9 in Geneva — the flagship pitch competition of the United Nations' AI for Good Global Summit, run by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for information and communication technology. Then musician and AI Skills Coalition advocate will.i.am, sitting as a surprise guest judge, personally matched the $20,000 competition purse out of his own pocket for Nearpays and the two other finalists, a Lagos health-AI startup called Doto Health and Nemocare. Nearpays walked away with double; the other two kept their original $20,000 each.
The number matters less than what it took to get there. Nearpays' win closed out a year-long funnel that started with more than 1,000 startup applications from 88 countries, worked through monthly regional pitching rounds from September 2025 to May 2026, narrowed to 210 semi-finalists and then 12 pre-finalists, and ended with four teams pitching live in front of a jury that included representatives from Amazon, Deloitte and Qualcomm Ventures. Nearpays' founder and CEO, Victor Daniyan, delivered the winning two-minute pitch himself.
The problem Nearpays says it is solving
Most African merchants who want to accept card payments face the same wall: a point-of-sale terminal costs money most small traders don't have lying around. Nearpays' answer is SoftPOS — software that turns the merchant's own smartphone into an NFC-enabled card reader, no extra hardware required. Layered on top is what the company calls its AI Tax Engine, which reads a merchant's transaction history and automates tax filing, aiming to catch cases where informal traders are effectively over-taxed for lack of proper accounting.
It's the pairing — payment acceptance plus compliance — that ITU's judges singled out as the differentiator among finalists. According to founder profiles and the company's own materials, Nearpays says it now serves more than 60,000 small and medium enterprises and processes upwards of 650,000 transactions a month, alongside earlier recognition including a Best Fintech Award at GITEX and an investment through Visa's Plug and Play accelerator program.
Why a pitch-competition win is not the same as market share
Here is the harder truth sitting underneath the Geneva stage lights: SoftPOS is not a new idea in Nigeria. Moniepoint and OPay have spent years building agent and terminal networks that, by some estimates, already put a payment device within reach of roughly two out of every three Nigerian adults. A UN prize buys Nearpays global visibility and a seat at future investor conversations — it does not, by itself, buy distribution against incumbents with years of merchant trust already banked.
The AI Tax Engine carries its own version of that gap. Automating tax compliance is not simply a software problem; it requires working integrations with tax authorities, and those relationships, particularly across Nigeria's evolving revenue-collection rules, tend to take years to build rather than months. Nearpays has not disclosed how many merchants use the tax product, what transaction volumes flow through it, or which state or federal tax bodies it has formal integrations with — gaps worth watching as the company tells its next chapter.
The frame this fits into
What makes this win worth a continent's attention isn't the underlying technology — NFC-enabled soft POS systems exist elsewhere — it's the venue and the judges. An African-founded company beat entries from 87 other countries in front of investors from Amazon, Deloitte and Qualcomm Ventures, at a summit whose stated mission is steering AI toward genuine, practical impact rather than pitch-deck promises. That is precisely the kind of global credibility signal — a UN jury, a Silicon Valley-adjacent panel, an unscripted extra $20,000 from a musician turned tech investor — that African fintechs rarely get handed for free, and that can move faster in the eyes of the next funding round than a slide of user-growth charts.
Daniyan has said the earlier 2025 win in Johannesburg, which qualified Nearpays for Geneva, reflected a broader ambition: proving African-built technology can compete with, not just follow, the pitch decks coming out of Silicon Valley and Europe. The company says it now plans to expand partnerships with technology firms, regulators and financial institutions and to scale SoftPOS into more African markets. Whether that global stage translates into merchants actually switching from Moniepoint's kiosks or OPay's agents to a smartphone app is the test that starts now — and it happens far from Geneva, on the ground in Lagos, Abuja and wherever Nearpays goes next.
