Nearpays Wins UN AI for Good Innovation Factory Title

In Short

• Nearpays has won the AI for Good Innovation Factory grand finale at the UN AI for Good Global Summit.
• It is the first African startup to win the global title.
• Nearpays is building SoftPOS, which turns Android phones into card payment terminals for merchants.

What Happened

Nigerian fintech Nearpays has won the AI for Good Innovation Factory grand finale, becoming the first African startup to take the top prize in the competition. The contest runs as part of the United Nations AI for Good Global Summit.

The Innovation Factory drew more than 500 startups globally. Each team pitched AI products aimed at social and economic challenges. AI means software that learns patterns from data, like a smarter autopilot for decisions, and can be used for things like fraud detection and compliance checks.

Nearpays qualified through the Africa regional round in Johannesburg. It then advanced to the global finals in Geneva and won the grand finale.

Nearpays was built to address a common payments problem across the continent. Many small and medium-sized businesses cannot afford point-of-sale terminals, or cannot get them deployed quickly, especially in rural and underserved areas.

Its product is SoftPOS, short for software point of sale. It lets merchants accept contactless card payments using a compatible Android smartphone, instead of dedicated POS hardware. Nearpays says AI is used across its stack for payment processing support, compliance, fraud detection, and business operations.

A key feature is offline capability. That means merchants can keep accepting payments even when internet connectivity is unreliable.

Why It Matters

This win puts more attention on practical fintech infrastructure, not just consumer apps. SoftPOS can lower the cost of card acceptance for merchants and widen digital payments coverage in places where terminals are scarce.

It also signals that African startups can compete in global AI competitions when they focus on local constraints like patchy networks, device availability, and day-to-day merchant workflows. For investors and operators, it is another data point that payments and fraud tooling, including AI-enabled compliance, is still a high-impact area across African markets.