Nigerian startup UniBeta uses AI to spot recurring exam topics
Founded by two University of Lagos students, UniBeta abandoned a failed campus super-app and rebuilt itself as an AI tool that mines past papers for high-yield topics.
UniBeta, a startup born at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) in Nigeria, launched an AI study tool called UniBeta AI in October 2025. Founded in 2023 by Dare Oluwayanmife Adeola and Olamide Onigbanjo, the company now concentrates on analysing past exam papers to surface the topic clusters most likely to be tested.
Students upload course materials and previous exam papers, and the model scans the text for patterns that recur across the syllabus. It then produces contextual flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes and modular summaries. "Most of the past questions from federal universities don't repeat the questions; they repeat topics," Adeola said.
From super-app to single focus
The founders originally aimed much wider, planning one platform for timetables, grade-point tracking, peer tutoring, career advice and a marketplace for student vendors. They first tested the idea offline through three experiments: tutorials run by top-performing students, a campus media channel called Inside Uni that produced street interviews, and paid promotional slots sold to students running side businesses.
Turning those experiments into a mobile app went badly. Funding the work from their own savings, the founders hired outside contract developers, but the resulting build was full of bugs and repeatedly failed App Store and Google Play reviews. The team released the one working module, the marketplace, as a lightweight web app and brought in a new engineer to rewrite the code. Adeola said the setback made him consider giving up.
The seasonality problem
According to the founders, their biggest lesson was that demand for education technology among Nigerian university students is seasonal. Usage surges as exams approach and collapses once they end, which pushed the team towards a product that delivers concentrated value during exam periods without heavy running costs.
The founders argue that general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT struggle with photocopied course packs and idiosyncratic local syllabuses. That positioning puts UniBeta up against Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and education-specific AI products. Its story illustrates how African edtech startups are trying to compete with global models by leaning on local data and context rather than raw scale.
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