Cubbes Technologies recently won the ₦30 million top prize at the Zenith Tech Fair 5.0 Startup Pitch Competition.
While this was a massive win for the Nigerian edtech startup, the seeds of that eventual success were sown long before, specifically, at a Techpoint Africa Pitch Friday in February 2025. The event had offered the company its critical first public validation.
Pitch Friday is a monthly event hosted by Techpoint Africa, designed as a platform for early-stage entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts to connect, learn, and grow their businesses.
Helping African students study better
Founded by Peter Adeyemi and Emmanuel Akinyele, Cubbes Technologies built an AI-powered edtech platform to bring university learning into the 21st century.
Their mission directly addresses a key pain point across many African universities: students struggle with fragmented study materials, disorganised administrative processes, and a lack of personalised academic support. The result is missed assignments, poor academic performance, and for many, further disillusionment with the educational system.
Cubbes utilises artificial intelligence to generate personalised practice questions, summarise lengthy course materials, and create smart study planners. Students simply select their institution, faculty, and level, and it instantly curates all their relevant materials, past questions, and lecture notes.
The solution goes beyond academics to include features such as Cubbes Pay to digitise the manual process of paying departmental and faculty dues, creating a holistic student super app. This comprehensive approach is clearly working, as the platform has already reached over 50,000 students across more than 100 institutions in Nigeria and Uganda.
Validation at Pitch Friday
Every successful startup needs a crucial moment to test its hypothesis against an audience of investors, founders, and operators. For Cubbes, that platform was Pitch Friday. Securing a spot and pitching on that major stage provided instant and invaluable benefits.
First, the preparation forced the founders to boil their solution down to a crystal-clear, investor-ready pitch, a refinement essential for future funding conversations. Second, the exposure is massive, placing the startup directly on the radar of investors and accelerator programs actively seeking high-potential ventures.
Finally, the often candid feedback from Pitch Friday helped Cubbes validate which product features truly resonated with users and which needed to be prioritised or eliminated.
The foundation laid at Pitch Friday quickly led to the next major step in their trajectory: acceptance into the Antler Lagos Accelerator program. Antler, a global early-stage VC firm, saw the immense potential in the Cubbes team and helped refine their solution.
“One of the team members at Antlers had seen our Pitch Friday presentation, and our application immediately stood out. Not just because of the work we were doing, but because he already knew the Cubbes’ name and had heard our pitch,” Peter Adeyemi shared in a video.
By the time the Zenith Tech Fair 5.0 (Future Forward) rolled around, Cubbes was no longer just an early-stage concept; it had clear traction, real users, and a polished strategy. Their pitch, backed by a robust, AI-driven product secured the top prize in the Startup Pitch Competition, winning ₦30 million in non-dilutive funding.
This is just one more win in an already eventful year for the startup, and Cubbes’ story is a clear message to every founder just beginning their journey.
Pitch Friday provides the necessary pressure to refine your pitch, the exposure to find your first institutional backers, and the essential validation that signals you are ready for scale.
For the final Pitch Friday for the year, we’ll be looking at “What will matter in 2026: Technology, Regulation, and Market Trends Founders Should Not Ignore.”
Happening on Friday, December 12, 2025 at 161 Obafemi Awolowo Way, Alausa, Ikeja, this impact session will feature industry leaders such as Musty Mustapha, Co-founder of Kuda; Gbenga Magbagbeola, Managing Director at Sycamore Investment and Asset Management Limited; Reva Attah, Digital Incubation Lead at Trium, and Solomon Ogene, an Investment professional.
