Wednesday 22 April, 2026

Nigerian tech made it into Google's most competitive African accelerator.

Four Nigerian startups have been selected for the 10th cohort of Google for Startups Accelerator Africa. The cohort runs from April 13 to June 19, 2026. Fifteen companies made it in total. Nigeria put in four.

They were chosen from nearly 2,600 applications.

The four are Bani, which builds cross-border payments infrastructure and eliminates settlement delays for African businesses. MasteryHive AI automates transaction reconciliation and fraud detection. Regxta works on regulatory compliance automation. Termii is a communications platform used by businesses across Africa for customer messaging.

All four are using AI to solve problems with a direct economic cost. That specificity matters. It means the applications were not about using technology because technology sounds good. They were about the places where the system creates friction and money leaks out.

Nigeria runs on informal workarounds. The formal infrastructure for payments, compliance, and business communication is either incomplete or expensive to navigate. These four companies are building the infrastructure that should exist at state level but doesn't. The fact that they had to go through 2,600 competitors to get six weeks of Google mentorship is itself a data point.

But they're in. That's where it starts.