David-Bobola Ojoawo was broke and homeless when he had his breakthrough.
The year was 2022, and Ojoawo had just watched his startup Cinevase—a cinematic metaverse experience—consume every naira he had. He was crashing on couches, freelancing to survive, and questioning whether dropping out of civil engineering at the University of Ibadan had been a colossal mistake.
Then he won second place at the Microsoft Global Hackathon alongside collaborators from Russia and Switzerland. The prize money was nice. The validation was everything.
Today, Ojoawo is the founder of CompasAI, a platform that’s quietly positioning itself as the future of how people learn in an AI-dominated world. Its flagship product, AGT (Aggregator), doesn’t just recommend courses—it creates them on the fly, tailored to exactly who you are and what you need to know.
The Problem With Online Learning
Here’s the dirty secret of the online education industry: most people who buy courses never finish them.
They pay hundreds of dollars for 50-hour programmes stuffed with content that’s either too basic, too advanced, or simply irrelevant to their actual goals. A journalist learning Python doesn’t need the same curriculum as a data scientist. A marketer exploring AI doesn’t need the deep technical foundation an engineer requires. But platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and their countless competitors treat everyone the same.
Ojoawo lived this frustration firsthand. Before CompasAI, he bounced between platforms, manually skipping irrelevant sections, searching for the specific knowledge he actually needed. It was inefficient, expensive, and exhausting.
“I realised people were paying hundreds of dollars for courses they didn’t have the potential to do,” Ojoawo says.
Enter AGT: The AI That Learns How You Learn
AGT works differently from anything else in the market.
When you sign up, the platform doesn’t just ask what you want to learn. It asks why you want to learn it. Your profession, your goals, your current skill level—all of it feeds into a psychometric AI that maps out exactly what you need to know and nothing more.
The results are dramatic. Where a traditional course might require 50 hours of your time, AGT condenses that into 45 minutes of targeted, essential information. The AI searches for the best available resources on the internet, then breaks lengthy content into bite-sized 15-minute topics calibrated to your difficulty level.
“The AI uses the user’s topic, goal, and context to search for the best resources,” Ojoawo explains. “A journalist wanting to learn coding gets a different scope than a marketer exploring the same topic.”
For ₦6,500 per month (about $12 for international users), subscribers get 60 hours of adaptive learning and unlimited access to the platform’s features, including calendar integration, WhatsApp reminders, and AI-led instruction designed to make continuous learning frictionless.
The Backstory: From Homeless to Harvard
Ojoawo’s journey to CompasAI is a study in stubborn persistence.
He started coding at 15, building automation systems and trading algorithms for clients across Europe and Asia. By the time he enrolled at the University of Ibadan for civil engineering, he already knew the traditional path wasn’t for him. After one year, he dropped out.
His parents—both lifelong educators—weren’t exactly thrilled. They demanded a two-year proof of concept before they’d support his unconventional direction. It was a fair ask, given that their son would soon be broke and homeless chasing entrepreneurial dreams.
The first major attempt was Cinevase, the metaverse project that consumed his savings. “We spent heavily on proof-of-concept rather than technology,” he admits. It was during this period that he met Olubunmi Fabanwo, who was then working at Binance as Africa Affiliate Program Manager. Fabanwo joined as co-founder.
The CompasAI idea emerged almost by accident. Friends kept asking Ojoawo to help them break into tech. He’d already built what he describes as “the world’s first career psychometric AI”—a tool that recommended skills based on individual traits and backgrounds. At an event, he showed it to a few attendees. Their response convinced him to turn a side project into a company.
Today, Ojoawo also conducts research at Harvard’s D^3 Institute while building CompasAI—a far cry from the couch-surfing days.
The Co-Founder: From Traditional Banking to Web3 to EdTech
Olubunmi Fabanwo’s path to CompasAI was equally unconventional.
He spent years at GTBank, one of Nigeria’s most profitable financial institutions, before the 2020 lockdown pushed him to pursue his fascination with blockchain technology. He joined Binance in March 2022 as Affiliate Program Manager for Africa, where he built and expanded programs across the continent, educating over 20,000 individuals in major African cities.
Fabanwo brings a unique combination of traditional finance discipline, Web3 community-building experience, and a deep understanding of how to scale products across African markets. His background in retail marketing, business development, and customer service complements Ojoawo’s technical expertise.
Market Validation: Awards, Government Partnerships, and Growing Recognition
CompasAI isn’t just a promising idea anymore. The market is responding.
The platform has won Pitchfest 2024, the World Summit Awards for most innovative learning platform from Nigeria, and regional victory in the Data Mellon Pitch AI battle. But the most significant validation came from the Nigerian Federal Government.
CompasAI secured a partnership with the 3 Million Tech Talent (3MTT) programme—a flagship initiative of the Ministry of Communications, Innovation & Digital Economy led by Dr. Bosun Tijani (recently profiled by TIME magazine). The partnership gives CompasAI the opportunity to power learning initiatives that could reach millions of Nigerians.
The 3MTT programme, launched in December 2023, aims to build Nigeria’s technical talent backbone and position the country as a net talent exporter. It has already partnered with Microsoft, the European Union, and over 120 organisations. For CompasAI, being selected to power learning within this ecosystem is a major endorsement of its personalised approach.
CompasAI, the Nigerian AI-powered learning platform, was accepted into Antler’s AI Disrupt programme in Singapore—one of the most competitive AI accelerators in Asia.
The acceptance marked a significant milestone for the Lagos-based startup. AI Disrupt was a four-week intensive residency that provided selected startups with $400,000 in pre-seed funding, over $650,000 in cloud computing and infrastructure credits, and access to Antler’s global network of investors and enterprise partners. The programme, which ran from October 21 to November 14, 2025, required founders to be physically present in Singapore for the entire duration.
For CompasAI founders David-Bobola Ojoawo and Olubunmi Fabanwo, this represented a turning point—from a bootstrapped Nigerian startup to a globally backed AI company with the resources and momentum to scale.
The Philosophy: AI Should Be AI
Ojoawo has strong opinions about how AI should be built.
“AI should be developed to be AI, not to mimic humans,” he argues. “Attempts to make AI human-like lead to a loss of accuracy and poorer performance.”
This philosophy shapes how AGT works. Rather than trying to simulate a human tutor, CompasAI leans into what AI does best: aggregating vast amounts of information and synthesising it into actionable, personalised outputs. In benchmarking tests, Ojoawo claims the platform outperforms tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for learning-specific tasks—completing personalised content searches in five to ten minutes versus twice that time for competitors.
The platform positions itself not as a replacement for human capability but as a tool for maintaining and upskilling careers in an economy where AI threatens to make entire roles obsolete.
What’s Next: Fundraising and Scale
Sixteen months into development, CompasAI is exploring fundraising for infrastructure scaling.
But Ojoawo is cautious. His experience with Cinevase—where aggressive spending on proof-of-concept nearly destroyed him—taught hard lessons about sustainable growth. He’s prioritising impact with current resources over venture capital-fueled expansion.
“My experience with failed ventures taught me the importance of sustainable growth,” he says.
For now, the focus is on maximising the 3MTT partnership, refining the AGT product, and proving that adaptive, AI-powered learning can work at scale in one of the world’s most challenging markets.
The Bigger Picture
CompasAI arrives at a critical moment.
AI is reshaping the global economy, and the workers most at risk are those who can’t adapt fast enough. Traditional education is too slow. Online courses are too generic. And the people who most need to upskill—those in emerging markets like Nigeria—often can’t afford the expensive Western platforms that dominate the industry.
For David-Bobola Ojoawo—the young man who convinced sceptical educator parents to support his unconventional path, who survived homelessness and failed startups—CompasAI represents vindication.
More importantly, it offers millions facing an uncertain AI future a way to stay relevant, skilled, and employable.
At ₦6,500 a month, that future is finally within reach.
