“Federal university lecturers rarely repeat exam questions verbatim; what they repeat are core topics.” When Dare Adeola and Olamide Onigbanjo got down to construct UniBeta on the University of Lagos, they made the quintessential early-stage mistake: making an attempt to construct an “everything app.” They crammed timetable scheduling, road vox pops, peer tutoring, and a campus market hawking thrift streetwear and perfumes right into a single platform. The outcome? The outsourced cell app arrived riddled with bugs, repeatedly failed Apple App Store and Google Play evaluations, and almost worn out their financial savings. Worse nonetheless, they ran headfirst into the brutal actuality of Nigerian edtech: huge visitors spikes two weeks earlier than exams, adopted by whole ghost-town churn the second papers are submitted. Instead of shutting down, they stripped away the bloat. Recognising that world chatbots like ChatGPT battle to make sense of photocopied course packs and idiosyncratic native syllabuses, they rebuilt UniBeta round algorithmic revision—coaching AI to identify high-yield matter clusters from previous papers. For TechCabal, OPEYEMI KAREEM goes inside UniBeta’s bruising journey from a failed campus super-app to a focused AI research device.
By their second yr, most college college students have settled right into a rhythm: gauging which lecturers demand probably the most vigilance, the place to unearth previous query papers, and find out how to survive examination seasons.
Dare Oluwayanmife Adeola arrived by a much less typical door. He entered the second-year Urban and Regional Planning class on the University of Lagos (UNILAG) through JUPEB—an intensive basis programme.
That rigorous preparatory yr pressured him to engineer a disciplined private schedule to stability his coursework alongside an energetic business hustle.
“Most students I observed were either sacrificing their grades to make ends meet, or burning out socially just to keep up academically,” Adeola advised TechCabal. “University is supposed to be a total experience. You shouldn’t have to compromise your degree to fund your life, or vice versa.”
In 2023, Adeola teamed up with Olamide Onigbanjo, then a Chemical Engineering undergraduate, to construct UniBeta.
The preliminary imaginative and prescient was an formidable, sprawling pupil super-app combining timetable scheduling, CGPA trackers, peer tutoring, profession recommendation, and an e-commerce market for pupil distributors.
Three years, a number of false begins, and a failed cell deployment later, UniBeta has stripped away the surplus to give attention to utilizing synthetic intelligence to assist undergraduates move their exams.
Three years and several other iterations later, UniBeta now makes use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to assist Nigerian college college students put together for exams.
Day 1: The three experiments
UniBeta didn’t start as software program. It started as an offline research schedule shared amongst associates.
Encouraged by their response, the founders broke their broader campus ambitions into three low-cost offline experiments.
The first check tackled teachers. Adeola recruited first-class college students throughout colleges at UNILAG to run focused tutorials for junior cohorts.
The premise was simple: undergraduates usually grasp advanced ideas quicker when taught by friends who’ve lately sat the identical exams below the identical lecturers.
“We started organising tutorials across campus, and I was observing their attendance to see whether people actually wanted to learn,” Adeola recalled.
The second experiment centered on neighborhood media. The founders launched Inside Uni, a campus life-style channel producing road interviews, vox pops, and relatable video content material. It rapidly drew an viewers, giving pupil creators an outlet whereas offering UniBeta with direct, natural campus distribution.
The third pillar was commerce. With pupil consideration secured, UniBeta started monetising by promoting promotional slots to undergraduate entrepreneurs operating aspect companies.
“We had students hawking everything from thrift fashion and streetwear brands to perfumes and jewellery,” Adeola mentioned.
Bolstered by traction throughout all three channels, the founders made a traditional early-stage mistake: trying to merge disparate merchandise right into a single app.
With an assembled workforce of three software program engineers, a presenter, a videographer, and a video editor, they got down to code an all-in-one platform that attempted to cater to teachers, media, and commerce concurrently.
Day 500: The app that didn’t work
Translating three distinct experiments right into a practical cell construct proved disastrous. Bootstrapping with their very own financial savings, the founders paid exterior contract builders to engineer the frontend and backend architectures.
Months later, the delivered code was riddled with bugs. The construct repeatedly failed App Store and Google Play overview pointers, falling wanting fundamental stability, interface responsiveness, and information compliance requirements.
“It was really discouraging to start again from scratch. This incident really made me consider abandoning the idea because I didn’t even know where to start from,” Adeola mentioned.
To preserve momentum alive, the founders salvaged the one practical module—the seller market—releasing it as a light-weight internet utility whereas hiring a brand new engineer to rebuild the underlying code.
The disaster pressured a essential product reassessment. The super-app premise had divided consumer consideration and sophisticated retention: advertisers, life-style viewers, and learning undergraduates every operated on completely totally different utilization cycles.
More essentially, the founders ran headfirst into the central structural defect of Nigerian edtech: excessive seasonality.
“The biggest lesson we learned was that the need for edtech platforms, especially for Nigerian university students, is seasonal,” Adeola mentioned. “We noticed a high influx of students when exams were closer and a high churn when exams were over.”
To survive, UniBeta wanted a device compelling sufficient to ship concentrated worth throughout these essential examination cycles with out requiring extreme operational overhead. That search led to synthetic intelligence.
Day 1000: UniBeta bets on AI
Rather than appearing as a static repository of PDF notes and previous questions, UniBeta pivoted towards automated syntheses.
In October 2025, the startup launched UniBeta AI.
The device permits undergraduates to add unstructured course supplies and historic examination papers.
Its mannequin then parses the textual content to determine syllabus recurring patterns, routinely producing contextual flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, and modular summaries.
“We noticed that most of the past questions from federal universities don’t repeat the questions; they repeat topics,” Adeola mentioned. “So we’re able to identify those topics and then help students to study those topics.”
The pivot put UniBeta in competitors with general-purpose chatbots and AI instruments constructed particularly for schooling, together with Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, Adeola believes UniBeta’s benefit is in constructing across the realities of African college college students.
“What we’re trying to do is to make it more niche towards Nigerian or African universities rather than what other products would do for a larger share of the market,” Adeola mentioned. “UniBeta AI would be more tailored to what a Nigerian university student actually understands and would actually be of value to them.”
UniBeta has a free tier, and different paid plans value between ₦2,000 and ₦6,000. The enterprise additionally generates income from occasions, Inside Uni promotions, and sponsored promoting. The firm has additionally secured an angel funding for an undisclosed quantity in September 2025.
UniBeta mentioned its subsequent problem is distribution, as it’s in talked with the National Universities Commission about constructing a unified information construction for accredited Nigerian universities.
If the plan comes collectively, the founders hope it can make it doable to take UniBeta to function throughout the nation with out having to construct a separate presence from scratch on each campus.
The firm additionally mentioned that the workforce is engaged on options together with slide creation and voice tutorials that might flip a pupil’s uploaded supplies into what resembles a one-on-one lesson. The longer-term ambition is to construct an AI product that understands how Nigerian college students research and the educational programs they must navigate.
“For an edtech platform to succeed, we also need to solve other problems students have outside the classroom so we can be relevant round the clock,” he mentioned.
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