Technology
Techstars Accepts Tunji Andrews’ Awabah
By Adedapo Adesanya
Awabah, a digital platform providing pension access to Africa’s self-employed, has announced that it has been accepted into the Techstars London accelerator programme.
The startup is dedicated to making micro-pension services available to those in the informal sector and those whose employers are not legally required to deduct and remit pension. It will join nine other startups in the class of 2021 and secure funding from the accelerator as it sets its sights on African expansion.
The Lagos-based company, founded by Mr Tunji Andrews, Ms Tina Ajishebiyawo and Mr Gboyega Olatunde, is building wealth for Africa’s informal, particularly self-employed population by ensuring that they are able to plan for a dignified life after retirement.
Awabah was launched in November of 2020 and signed up over 700 clients in its first two months. It has since dedicated its strategy to advance the cause for future financial inclusion and security in Africa ever since. It already sees itself as the solution to Africa’s wealth redistribution challenge.
The company has now partnered with three Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) in Nigeria and hopes to increase this to five before the end of 2021. The partnerships will coincide with multi-city rollouts to avail millions more access to the Awabah advantage.
In July 2021, the company raised $200,000 in angel backing from early-stage investors like ODBA and Co Ventures and Correlation Capital. The new funding helped Awabah to roll out its services in Lagos and Ibadan.
The startup has plans to start providing services in 5 more Nigerian cities over the next 6 months.
Speaking on this, the company CEO, Mr Andrews said he believes the company is gathering a lot of acceptance because of its approach to customer acquisition, operating out of Lagos and Ibadan with plans to set up a presence in Ghana.
“Awabah in simple terms is an aggregator of wealth creation tools that are sorely lacking on the continent. We onboard the financial service providers, break their products into bite-size chunks, sprinkle a bit of the Awabah magic on it, and give this leverage to our customers.
“What’s even greater is that our services come completely at no charge to the customer. Financial services should liberate, not enslave,” Mr Andrews said.
Ms Ajishebiyawo, on her part, said she strongly believes that reducing poverty depends on helping those in the informal sector manage and grow their wealth.
She insisted that the reduction was greatly reliant on access to diverse tools to help leverage income that is either infrequent or so frequent it’s spent on daily consumables.
“It’s not that people in informal employment are too uneducated to control their finances. Quite the opposite. They manage highly complicated budgets on very tight margins.
“Effective retirement planning and savings help our customers more effectively confront the problems that keep them stuck in an inefficient cycle. Nigerians and indeed Africans have money – but their incomes are unpredictable and insecure; Awabah is fixing this,” the finance expert said.
The Awabah Model
Off the back of it, the Awabah model has a lot of merits. Nigeria has 70 million people in its labour force (people ready to work and able to work) and of this 70 million, 23 million are unemployed and another 11 million employed in formal jobs, leaving 36 million Nigerians in one form of self-employment or entrepreneurship without any retirement savings.
With a serious decline in economic growth and increased scarcity of resources, the company says it believes Africa’s current labour market will face severe hardship in old age if they don’t take retirement savings seriously.
Nigerians in the informal sector can see the real value by setting aside N100 weekly into a pension fund that is invested at a real return of 4.5 per cent per year for the rest of their working years.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PWC) Africa Asset Management 2020 report, the total assets under management in 12 selected Africa countries (South Africa, Morocco, Mauritius, Namibia; Egypt, Kenya, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria; Angola, Algeria, Tunisia) were $293 billion in 2008 and rose to $634 billion by 2014 and are expected to reach $1.1 trillion in 2020.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the players in the Nigerian gaming industry, Secure Electronic Technology (SET) Plc, has appointed Ms Leticia Otomewo as its acting secretary.
This followed the expiration of the company’s service contract with the former occupier of the seat, Ms Irene Attoe, on January 31, 2026.
A statement to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday said Ms Otomewo would remain the organisation’s scribe in an acting capacity, pending the ratification and appointment of a substantive company secretary at the next board meeting.
She was described in the notice signed by the Managing Director of the firm, Mr Oyeyemi Olusoji, as “a results-driven executive with 22 years of experience in driving business growth, leading high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions.”
The acting secretary is also said to be “a collaborative leader with a passion for mentoring and developing talent.”
“The company assures the investing public that all Company Secretariat responsibilities and regulatory obligations will continue to be discharged in full compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act, applicable regulations, and the Nigerian Exchange Limited Listing Rules,” the disclosure assured.
Meanwhile, the board thanked Ms Attoe “for professionalism and contributions to the Company during the period of her engagement and wishes her well in her future endeavours.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Russian government on Thursday confirmed it has blocked the WhatsApp messaging service, as it moves to further control information flow in the country.
It urged Russians to use a new state-backed platform called Max instead of the Meta-owned service.
WhatsApp issued a statement earlier saying Russia had attempted to “fully block” its messaging service in the country to force people toward Max, which it described as a “surveillance app.”
“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive people to a state-owned surveillance app,” WhatsApp posted on social media platform X.
“Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” it said, adding: “We continue to do everything we can to keep users connected.”
Russia’s latest move against social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram comes amid a wider attempt to drive users toward domestic and more easily controlled and monitored services, such as Max.
Russia’s telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has accused messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian legislation requiring companies to store Russian users’ data inside the country, and of failing to introduce measures to stop their platforms from being used for allegedly criminal or terrorist purposes.
It has used this as a basis for slowing down or blocking their operations, with restrictions coming into force since last year.
For Telegram, it may be next, but so far the Russian government has been admittedly slowing down its operations “due to the fact that the company isn’t complying with the requirements of Russian legislation.”
The chat service, founded by Russian developers but headquartered in Dubai, has been a principal target for Roskomnadzor’s scrutiny and increasing restrictions, with users reporting sluggish performance on the app since January.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.
According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.
SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.
Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.
“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.
For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”
“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.
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