When Dare Adeola and Olamide Onigbanjo set out to build UniBeta at the University of Lagos, they made the quintessential early-stage mistake: trying to build an “everything app.” Their platform crammed timetable scheduling, street vox pops, peer tutoring, and a campus marketplace hawking thrift streetwear and perfumes into a single product. The outsourced mobile app arrived riddled with bugs, repeatedly failed Apple App Store and Google Play reviews, and nearly wiped out the founders’ savings.

Worse still, the pair collided headfirst with a structural reality of Nigerian edtech: massive traffic spikes in the two weeks before exams, followed by near-total churn the moment papers were submitted. Designing around that rhythm—concentrating value into short, high-stakes windows rather than spreading attention thin—became the constraint that shaped everything UniBeta built next.

Instead of shutting down, they stripped away the bloat. Recognising that global chatbots such as ChatGPT struggle to make sense of photocopied course packs and idiosyncratic local syllabuses, they rebuilt UniBeta around algorithmic revision—training AI to spot high-yield topic clusters hidden in past papers. TechCabal’s Opeyemi Kareem traces the startup’s bruising three-year journey from a failed campus super-app to a targeted AI study tool, an evolution that unfolded in three rough phases: the experiments, the failed build, and the AI bet.

From foundation programme to founding team

By their second year, most university students have settled into a rhythm: gauging which lecturers demand the most vigilance, where to unearth past question papers, and how to survive exam seasons.

Dare Oluwayanmife Adeola arrived through a less conventional door. He entered the second-year Urban and Regional Planning class at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) via JUPEB, an intensive foundation programme. That rigorous preparatory year forced him to engineer a disciplined personal schedule to balance coursework alongside an active commercial hustle.

“Most students I observed were either sacrificing their grades to make ends meet, or burning out socially just to keep up academically,” Adeola told 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 build UniBeta. The initial vision was an ambitious, sprawling student super-app combining timetable scheduling, CGPA trackers, peer tutoring, career advice, and an e-commerce marketplace for student vendors—all built while both founders were still full-time students.

Three years, several false starts, and one failed mobile deployment later, UniBeta has stripped away the excess to pursue a single focus: using artificial intelligence (AI) to help Nigerian university students prepare for—and pass—their exams.

Day 1: Three experiments

UniBeta did not begin as software. It began as an offline study schedule shared among friends. Encouraged by the response, the founders broke their broader campus ambitions into three low-cost offline experiments.

The first test tackled academics. Adeola recruited first-class students across faculties at UNILAG to run targeted tutorials for junior cohorts. The premise was straightforward: undergraduates often grasp complex concepts faster when taught by peers who have recently sat the same exams under the same 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 focused on community media. The founders launched Inside Uni, a campus lifestyle channel producing street interviews, vox pops, andatable video content. It quickly drew an audience, giving student creators an outlet while providing UniBeta with direct, organic campus distribution.

The third pillar was commerce. With student attention secured, UniBeta began monetising by selling promotional slots to undergraduate entrepreneurs running side businesses.

“We had students hawking everything from thrift fashion and streetwear brands to perfumes and jewellery,” Adeola said.

Bolstered by traction across all three channels, the founders made the classic follow-up mistake: attempting to merge disparate products into a single app. With an assembled team of three software engineers, a presenter, a videographer, and a video editor, they set out to code an all-in-one platform that tried to serve academics, media, and commerce simultaneously.

Day 500: The app that didn’t work

Translating three distinct experiments into a functional mobile build proved disastrous. Bootstrapping with their own savings, the founders paid external contract developers to engineer the frontend and backend architectures. Months later, the delivered code was riddled with bugs. The build repeatedly failed App Store and Google Play review guidelines, falling short of basic stability, interface responsiveness, and data compliance standards.

“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 said.

To keep momentum alive, the founders salvaged the only functional module—the vendor marketplace—releasing it as a lightweight web application while hiring a new engineer to rebuild the underlying code. The stopgap preserved a working product while the rebuild got underway.

The crisis forced a critical product reassessment. The super-app premise had divided user attention and complicated retention: advertisers, lifestyle viewers, and studying undergraduates each operated on entirely different usage cycles. More fundamentally, the founders ran into the central structural defect of Nigerian edtech: extreme seasonality.

“The biggest lesson we learned was that the need for edtech platforms, especially for Nigerian university students, is seasonal,” Adeola said. “We noticed a high influx of students when exams were closer and a high churn when exams were over.”

To survive, UniBeta needed a tool compelling enough to deliver concentrated value during those critical exam cycles without requiring excessive operational overhead. That search led to artificial intelligence.

Day 1000: UniBeta bets on AI

Rather than acting as a static repository of PDF notes and past questions, UniBeta pivoted toward automated synthesis. In October 2025, the startup launched UniBeta AI.

The tool allows undergraduates to upload unstructured course materials and historical exam papers. Its model then parses the text to identify recurring syllabus patterns, automatically generating 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 said. “So we’re able to identify those topics and then help students to study those topics.”

The pivot placed UniBeta in competition with general-purpose chatbots and AI tools built specifically for education, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adeola believes UniBeta’s advantage lies in building around the realities of African university students rather than chasing a larger share of the market. The wager is that photocopied course packs, idiosyncratic local syllabuses, and past papers that repeat topics rather than questions reward a tool trained specifically on them—an area where the founders found global chatbots struggle.

“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,” he said. “UniBeta AI would be more tailored to what a Nigerian university student actually understands and would actually be of value to them.”

UniBeta operates a free tier, with paid plans priced between ₦2,000 and ₦6,000. The business also generates revenue from events, Inside Uni promotions, and sponsored advertising. In September 2025, the company secured an angel investment of an undisclosed amount.

The road ahead

UniBeta said its next challenge is distribution. The startup is in talks with the National Universities Commission, the federal regulator of Nigerian universities, about building a unified data structure for accredited Nigerian universities. If the plan comes together, the founders hope it will allow UniBeta to operate across the country without having to build a separate presence from scratch on every campus.

The company also said the team is developing features including slide creation and voice tutorials that could turn a student’s uploaded materials into something resembling a one-on-one lesson. The longer-term ambition is to build an AI product that understands how Nigerian students study and the academic systems they must navigate. How those distribution talks progress, and whether the new features ship as planned, will indicate whether UniBeta can extend a single-campus playbook into a national one—and deliver the year-round relevance Adeola describes.

“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,” Adeola said.