Nigerian fintech Nearpays has become the first African startup to win the AI for Good Innovation Factory grand finale — the ITU-run global competition that forms one of the anchor events of the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit — beating a field of more than 500 startups worldwide.
The competition, organized by the International Telecommunication Union in partnership with a number of UN agencies, invites AI-driven startups to pitch solutions to social and economic challenges. Nearpays’ route to the global title ran through Johannesburg, where it took the African regional competition, before advancing through the Geneva semi-finals and claiming the grand finale itself. The win closes a first-of-its-kind chapter for the continent in a competition that has been running for several editions without an African champion.
Nearpays was founded to address a specific structural gap in African payments infrastructure: the small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford or access traditional point-of-sale terminals. Cost, hardware availability and deployment complexity have kept large numbers of merchants — particularly in rural and underserved communities across sub-Saharan Africa — locked out of digital payments infrastructure even as consumer-side digital finance has scaled.
The company’s answer is SoftPOS — an AI-powered platform that turns compatible Android smartphones into payment acceptance devices, letting merchants take contactless card payments without dedicated hardware. AI is embedded across the platform’s operational layer, running payment processing, compliance workflows, fraud detection and business operations rather than sitting as a bolt-on feature.
The engineering choice that most obviously shaped the win, judging by Nearpays’ own positioning, is the platform’s ability to work both online and offline. Merchants can continue accepting payments even when internet connectivity drops — a design decision that reflects African infrastructure realities in a way that most globally designed SoftPOS platforms typically do not. For fintech innovation in markets where mobile data coverage is patchy and merchant device diversity is high, that engineering choice is meaningful.
Nearpays credited years of product development and customer engagement work with the outcome, and thanked the UN, ITU and AI for Good initiative for building a platform where innovators can apply AI to real-world problems. It also positioned the win as a signal to other African founders — that technology built to solve local problems can compete internationally on its own terms rather than as a subsidiary category of “emerging markets” solutions. Details on the specific prize structure, next-stage funding or immediate roadmap were not disclosed in the announcement iAfrica has seen.
The Nearpays result lands inside a summer where Africa’s presence inside AI for Good’s institutional layer has visibly widened. In July, the AI for Good Global Commission was launched with eight Africans in its 44 founding seats, co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame alongside Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, with Nigeria’s Bosun Tijani, Namibia’s Emma Theofelus and Togo’s Cina Lawson among the African government appointees. Where that commission is designed to shape the policy-level architecture of global AI governance, Nearpays’ Innovation Factory win sits at the operational end of the same conversation — a working example of the case African founders and policy leaders have been making across 2026 that AI built for African contexts can compete on the global stage.
For Nigerian fintech specifically, the timing is neat. The country’s second national AI positioning is currently ranked highest in Africa on the UNESCO Government AI Readiness Index; Paystack launched its AI-agent checkout Index in Nigeria in late June, letting users pay through Claude, ChatGPT and OpenClaw; Meta ran its Nigerian AI accelerator through 2025; and the Nigeria AI Regulation Bill has been moving through legislative review. Nearpays’ win adds a global validation layer to a national ecosystem that has been building the case for its AI credentials on paper. The next question is whether that global recognition translates into follow-on capital, cross-border merchant deployments and integrations that push SoftPOS beyond Nigeria into the wider African markets where the underserved-SME gap is structurally similar but the infrastructure realities are more constrained still.
