Ten teams selected from 3,856 applicants; incubation and an IR demo day in Korea to follow
ABUJA – ACE Startup Academy, which supports innovation-driven growth for Nigerian youth and SMEs, held the final round of its pitch competition on 15 October 2026 at the E-Government Training Centre, Public Service Institute of Nigeria (PSIN) auditorium in Abuja, selecting its final 10 teams.
The competition was held as part of the “Project for Establishing a Startup Digital Innovation Academy to Support Youth and SME Innovation Growth in Nigeria,” supported by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) as the partner agency. The project is being implemented by a consortium consisting of Soongsil University, Maincontents, and Eduniety Lab.
The final round was graced by H.E. Jung Yo-an, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to Nigeria; Senator John Owan Enoh, Honourable Minister of State for Industry, Trade and Investment; Mr. Blessed Chirimuta, Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP Nigeria; Mr. Charles O. Odii, Director General and CEO of SMEDAN; Dabureje Onesi-Lawani, Director of Monitoring and Evaluation, SMEDAN; and Mr. Kim Eun-seop, Country Director of the KOICA Nigeria Office.
From 3,856 applicants to 10 teams
The first cohort of ACE Startup Academy opened with 3,856 applications. Of these, 120 teams were selected for the training programme for aspiring entrepreneurs and completed courses in business modelling and digital and AI capability. Forty-five of the teams that finished the training advanced to the preliminary round, held over two days on 7 and 8 October. The 10 teams that came through the preliminaries took to the stage for the final.
The final round ran as a pitch and question-and-answer session for each team, assessed on site by five judges. The panel was chaired by Mrs. Ifeanyi Iloh of Ventures Park, with two judges from SMEDAN, one from Steady Anchor Limited and one from the KOICA Nigeria Office.
Run on an online judging solution
Both the preliminary and final rounds were run and judged on an online judging solution developed by Lim Han- kyu, CEO of Maincontents, who joined the project as a competition operations specialist.
Teams uploaded everything needed for their pitch — IR decks, MVPs and demo video links — directly to the solution, and judges opened those materials on the same screen while scoring on their laptops. Entry, document collection, scoring and tallying were all handled within a single system.
Instead of collecting paper score sheets and adding them up by hand, results were compiled the moment a pitch ended, and the full scoring record was retained. On the day of the final, tallying was completed as soon as the tenth team finished presenting, allowing the awards ceremony to follow immediately.
“The judging solution finishes the tallying on site, and at the same time it gathers the pitch decks, the MVPs and the comments the judges leave, all in one place,” Lim said. “Once that is analysed into each team’s strengths and areas to improve, it becomes the starting material for the incubation stage.”
Loghema takes the Grand Prize
The Grand Prize of US$5,000 went to Loghema, an AI service that recognises scripture references spoken during a sermon and puts the verse on screen within seconds. The team built it around a familiar problem: by the time the media operator has found the passage and chosen a translation, the preacher has already moved on. It is targeting the more than 100,000 churches in Nigeria.
The Excellence Award of US$3,000 went to Tita Universal Services Ltd, an AI platform that generates lecture timetables for tertiary institutions. It aims to reduce the room clashes and omitted courses that arise where timetables are still drawn up by hand.
The Merit Award of US$2,000 went to Tiptop Tutors, a virtual science laboratory that lets secondary school students repeat chemistry, physics and biology practicals where equipment and lab time are scarce. Its app, HandyLab, has students choose each step of an experiment, take measurements with virtual apparatus, receive immediate feedback and try again, and offers both a guided mode and a self-paced mode. It also works offline, in recognition of unreliable internet access.
Encouragement Awards of US$1,000 each went to OneClickMed, which connects patient records across health facilities; Ikor, an AI writing tool that runs entirely offline on low-end devices; and Gyronics, developer of Axol, a wearable interface that allows people with upper-limb disabilities to control their devices.
Challenge Awards of US$500 each went to Acclusivo; Saipris, which identifies struggling students early using performance data schools already hold; Monovella, which links women’s health management with specialist appointments; and Meertech Ltd, which catches export documentation errors before shipment.
With a total prize fund of US$15,000, all 10 finalists received an award.
Making sure everyone starts from the same line
Sign language interpretation was provided throughout the competition, from the preliminaries to the final, to support the participation of Acclusivo, a deaf-led startup. That support will continue through the incubation programme and the visit to Korea.
Acclusivo is led by Victor Oricha, who is deaf and serves as founder and CTO. DeafLMS, the platform the team is developing, is a visual-first STEM learning platform for deaf children that brings a lesson otherwise scattered across the teacher, the interpreter, the textbook and the screen into a single visual environment.
From training to competition
The training programme for aspiring entrepreneurs that preceded the competition consisted of a business model (BM) track and an AI and digital innovation track. A BM curriculum running from problem definition and customer validation through value proposition, revenue model and financial planning was delivered alongside data and AI practicals.
The training was carried out together with local instructors and mentors developed through the training of trainers (ToT) programme that the Soongsil University consortium ran in the early phase of the project. Mentors who completed the ToT also took part in running this competition.
Next: incubation, then Seoul
The 10 finalists will join the ACE centre’s incubation programme for mentoring and hands-on coaching. One member from each team will then travel to Korea to experience the country’s startup and investment ecosystems first-hand, visiting companies and taking part in an IR demo day before investors.
The competition is therefore not an end point but one stage in ACE’s growth pathway, which links training, selection, incubation and investment.
The project aims to support innovation-driven growth for Nigerian youth and SMEs and to establish a sustainable digital startup ecosystem through the ACE operational model.