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Forty-five technology teams are competing in the sixth edition of Thrive in Tech in Lagos, with organisers and industry experts challenging young innovators to move beyond ideas and build solutions capable of creating real impact and becoming sustainable businesses.
The two-day technology and innovation event with the theme “Build for Impact,” opened on Friday, August 21, 2026, at GolfView Suites & Conference Centre, Ikeja, Lagos.
The event brings together technology professionals, innovators, engineers, product leaders, career seekers and aspiring tech professionals, with the first day dedicated to a hackathon and the second to talks, panel discussions, mentorship and networking.
According to the founder and convener of Thrive in Tech, Femi Ayilara, more than 100 teams initially registered for the hackathon, with 45 eventually selected to compete across eight innovation tracks.
Ayilara said the initiative, which began in 2020, was created to help people enter the technology industry, build their careers, and develop solutions to real-world problems.
“We are here to innovate. We had over 100 teams register for the hackathon,” he said.
He explained that Thrive in Tech was born after the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired partly by his own experience with mentorship.
“I’m a product of mentorship myself, and a group of friends and I came together to start Thrive in Tech in 2020,” he said.
The three top teams will receive ₦500,000, ₦300,000 and ₦200,000 respectively, while participants will also receive AWS credits and other technical support.
Ayilara said the total value of the prizes and support available to participants exceeds ₦1 million.
He, however, stressed that the organisers are looking beyond the cash prizes, with the goal of helping teams develop their ideas into viable products.
“Beyond the prize money, we want to support the teams and enable organisations to see value in what they have built,” he said.
He disclosed that QoreID has a dedicated track and intends to support participants in that track, while one of the partners is providing free hosting to help teams deploy their solutions.
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According to him, all 45 teams that made it to the finale stand to benefit from the programme through vouchers, tools, and other opportunities to further develop their ideas.
The Chief Judge of the hackathon and Chief Technology Architect at ipNX Nigeria Limited, Oluwaseun Oluboyo, said the teams were working on real problems across different tracks.
He said the objective was not simply to see participants build technology but to ensure that their solutions could make a meaningful difference.
“We don’t just do things for the sake of doing them. We do things because they make a difference in society and in our world,” Oluboyo said.
He explained that he expected some of the solutions developed during the hackathon to eventually become commercial products capable of making a measurable impact.
For Akintola Taofeek, Head of Engineering and Payments Architect at Hydrogen and one of the hackathon judges, the ability to attract funding should not be the only measure of a successful startup.
He said the first question innovators should ask is whether their product is solving a genuine problem.
“Many people come up with products, but not all those products are scalable. Not all those products are solving problems,” Akintola said.
Meanwhile, Babatunde Ojumu, Director of Technical Solutions at SoftAlliance & Resources, said his organisation was supporting the programme through its cloud infrastructure offering.
Ojumu said the company had provided local hosting services for enterprise customers for years and was now making its infrastructure more accessible to smaller innovators.
He said SoftKloud would provide participating young developers with one month of free access to its platform, after which some services could cost as little as ₦10,000 monthly.
The initiative, he explained, would allow young innovators to host their solutions locally instead of spending scarce foreign exchange on international cloud platforms.
