17-Year-Old Wins Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon, Walks Away With $4,000

More than 1,000 developers submitted to the Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon. Ten made the shortlist. Three placed. The developer who took first prize and $4,000 is 17 years old.

His name is Abdullah Ajala, and the AI tool he built, PayWise, is now what the entire hackathon is being talked about for.

The hackathon

Nomba and DevCareer ran the hackathon over five weeks, with a main challenge that ran from June 30 to July 7. Developers got direct access to Nomba's full API stack, checkout, virtual accounts, transfers, and webhooks, across two tracks, a build track and an infrastructure track. The instruction was simple. No theoretical builds. Ship something a real customer can actually use.

"The aim was never to just build something to demo," says Jafer Shariff, Nomba's Head of Operations. "The aim was to ship something live, something customers can actually use and enjoy, and maybe something that becomes the foundation of a business for the developers themselves."

That instruction held. Every developer who made it through the hackathon shipped a live product, not just the top 10 or the final three. The prize money only separated the teams that placed. Everyone else was encouraged to keep building on what they made rather than shelve it once judging ended.

The top three

First place, and the $4,000 prize, went to PayWise, an AI built into WhatsApp that helps small business owners track credit sales using voice notes in their own language. Traders send a voice note the way they already talk to customers all day, and PayWise logs the debtor, tracks the amount, sends reminders, and marks the debt settled once it's paid.

Second place, and $1,500, went to Glasspot, a money pooling tool built for how Nigerians already save together informally. Contributions sit in a shared pot, not a personal account, and money only moves when an agreed rule fires, a savings target, a set date, a repeating schedule, or a trusted member's approval. Every contribution is tracked in real time so the group can see it.

Third place, and $1,000, went to Paye, a payment routing layer built for developers instead of consumers. It sits between merchant applications and multiple payment gateways, Nomba, OPay, Paystack, and Flutterwave, so developers integrate once instead of separately with each one. From a dashboard, merchants can switch which provider is active without touching code, provision virtual accounts on demand, and receive consistent webhook events no matter which gateway sent them.

Meet Abdullah

Abdullah's idea for PayWise didn't come from a whiteboard. It came from watching people around him, family, friends, small business owners in his community, track debt the only way they knew how: in a notebook.

"This person owes 500 naira. This person paid some, not all," he says, describing the kind of entries he'd seen. The problem is notebooks tear, get soaked, get lost, and the record goes with them. For a trader running credit on memory and trust, a ruined notebook is lost income.

PayWise replaces the notebook with a voice note. A trader talks the way she already talks to customers and suppliers, and the AI takes it from there, logging who owes what and following up when it's due.

He chose WhatsApp deliberately. "That's where these business owners already are," Abdullah says. Small business owners in Nigeria don't need to be introduced to WhatsApp, and they use it in the language they actually think in, not the language most app interfaces assume.

The hardest part of the build wasn't the WhatsApp integration. It was getting voice notes in Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa to convert into text the AI could actually use, not a literal translation, but the context, intonation, and accent behind what someone meant. That's where most of his five weeks went.

His biggest lesson wasn't technical. "Building the app was only half the journey," he says. The other half was putting it in front of real traders in real markets and seeing what actually held up. Validation, not code, is what he now considers the harder skill.

Asked what he'd change, he points to the wallet feature. He'd build more into it. It's a small answer, but the kind you only arrive at once real people are using what you made.

What it says

Over 1,000 developers took a swing at Nomba's API stack in five weeks. Every one who made it through shipped something live. Three placed. One of them isn't old enough to vote yet.

For Nomba, the hackathon was never just about a prize pool. It was a bet that developers who spend five weeks building real things on the stack come out the other side as advocates, not just users, backed by certification, an affiliate revenue share, and now, visibility for teams like PayWise, Glasspot, and Paye. Judging by what got built, and who built it, that bet is paying off.