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 Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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