At 16, Asanato Mayor is building four digital products from Jos, Plateau State — not from Lagos, the country's main tech hub. Much of Nigeria's tech activity and startup funding is concentrated in Lagos. He works alone, is still in secondary school, and says he taught himself to code.

He started at 13, learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript — the core building blocks of the web — on his own, ChatGPT and Gemini serving as tutors. “Nobody taught me. I learnt it myself, and ChatGPT and Gemini were my tutors,” he says.

His mother introduced him to the basics of computers and the internet, but he says his school did not teach him to code. “The school has a computer lab, but I didn't learn anything there,” he says.

He now wants to turn that work into a company, Mayor Group, built around people his own age.

A company for under-18s

Mayor says he is deliberately building for — and plans to work with — people under 18. “I'm very intentional about building for people under 18 and working with them. The story of doing this at such a young age is what people will want to hear,” he says.

His goal is for Mayor Group to become one of the best-known startups owned by a team under 18, whether in Nigeria, Africa or globally.

For now, that team is just him. The company is not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) — the agency through which Nigerian companies gain formal legal status — and he says his age is the obstacle. “I am under 18, so CAC won't let me register on my own. I will register through my parents once money starts coming in,” he says.

The four products

Notice is an online notice board. Creators post a notice and share it through a QR code, and anyone who scans it can view it for free. Mayor plans to offer a monthly subscription for creators. The product launched earlier but has been suspended and currently has no users. It is the only one of the four to have launched so far. “We launched it, but I had to suspend it because there are some issues I need to fix,” he says.

Mivo AI is a chatbot with a normal mode and an educational mode that helps students study, for instance by walking them through quadratic equations, a core secondary school maths topic. It runs on an engine he built, called the Miano Series, which draws on APIs from other AI providers. It has not launched; he expects to release it in the first week of 2027.

Zango is a social network for neighbours, inspired by Nextdoor, a foreign app. It uses geolocation to place users into groups for their area. An AI moderator, Obsidian Cluster, issues strikes for abuse or obscene content and removes users after 10 strikes, with human review for appeals. Mayor expects to launch it between October 18 and 23, 2026.

Zeero is a marketplace and job board for beginners. It will not handle payments; buyers and sellers agree on terms in a chat and pay outside the app. There is no launch date. “LinkedIn and Upwork ask for too much. I wanted something a beginner with no experience can just walk into,” he says.

A name for a chain of industries

The company has carried several names: Asacorp, Asterix, Maytech and now Mayor Group. “Maytech would have limited us to tech. Mayor is my name, and group means a chain of industries,” he says. It will start with technology and move into physical businesses later.

Mayor's earlier ventures included selling AI-generated designs from age 12, though he says several clients did not pay him. His first app, Rivol, built at 14 to connect under-18 builders, shut down after almost a year because it never attracted users or funding.

His main lesson came from that period. “People won't help you unless you have proof or money,” he says.

The next checkpoints are concrete: Zango's launch window of October 18 to 23, 2026, Mivo AI's expected release in the first week of 2027, and Notice's return once its issues are fixed. Zeero has no launch date yet.

His advice to other young builders outside the big cities is simple. “Never give up. If Mark Zuckerberg had given up, we wouldn't have Facebook,” he says.