Farouk Ibrahim, a product engineer, once went from hostel to hostel at the University of Ibadan, in Oyo State, southwestern Nigeria, trying to sell his software.
This software, Peernet, let lecturers share learning materials with students over a private network. Ibrahim charged ₦100 ($0.074) after 20 free tries, but nobody paid; rather, students called him to unlock the app.
He couldn’t understand it.
“Why won’t you just give me ₦100?” he remembers thinking. The experience stayed with him. “Building a product is less than half the work. Getting people to care about what you’ve built is arguably the bigger challenge,” he says.
That lesson has shaped his work with startups, including OpenInsured, an AI company building a real estate data platform. In 2026, he says his work contributed to its $8 million raise, despite writing fewer than 100 lines of code that year.
“I used to hate selling. I used to hate asking people for money,” he says. “Now, selling is something I see as very important. It is the ability to make people care about what you build.”
Paper toys
Before software, Ibrahim says he made toys. Growing up in Ibadan, he repaired broken toys or made paper replacements, sometimes selling them to schoolmates for ₦5 ($0.0037). His paper laptop was his most popular invention, featuring a stick-fighting game controlled by pulling threads attached to broomsticks.
“It became very popular then, and it made me famous, actually,” he says.
He also enjoyed drawing and imagined becoming an architect, so much that his father bought cardboards for him to recreate buildings they spotted during road trips. But that ambition changed when his mother bought a Dell desktop for a remote course.
At the time, Ibrahim was about 10 years old and initially forbidden from touching the computer. But when his mother finished the course, he finally had access to it.
“It was the best gift I ever had, although it wasn’t directly gifted to me,” he says. “Or rather, it was the best thing I ever stole, if I should put it that way. And that was when I stopped drawing.”
He first used the computer to play games, but Wolfenstein, a modifiable first-person shooter, caught his attention after a friend shared game DVDs.
“I tried to learn how to modify the game,” he says. “That was actually when I started getting interested in coding and making things happen on the computer.”
His parents considered him too young for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), a national exam for students seeking university admission, so he took Cambridge A-levels, where he met other students interested in computers.
“I wasn’t the only one who knew about computers,” he recalls.
He learnt about 12 programming languages, including C++, Java and C#, and built an operating system and kernel to understand how they worked.
After missing university admission on his first attempt, he spent another year at home studying computer science materials. He eventually gained admission to the University of Ibadan through direct entry, skipping his first year.
From selling software to learning the value of his skills
By his final year, Ibrahim had several software products online, including Peernet, which he modified and listed on platforms such as CodeCanyon and Envato.
“I made my first dollar online,” he says. “When people were buying the products, I thought that maybe it was just numbers going up. And then when the money dropped into my account, that’s when I knew that, oh God, I’m the next billionaire.”
Another product was RapidBazz, a Postgres-based platform with functionality similar to Firebase. Ibrahim says it attracted about 10 purchases. One buyer, a UK-based man named John, wanted to turn it into a startup.
“I took it off the platform and worked with him to develop it properly,” Ibrahim says. But they could not continue after he lost contact with John, whom he believes had suffered a major loss.
After graduating from the university in 2019, Ibrahim wanted to build products rather than take a conventional job.
“I wasn’t looking for a job; I just wanted one of my software products to blow up really,” he says.
Unfortunately, none took off as he hoped, and the COVID-19 pandemic made his finances more difficult.
“When the coronavirus came in, it dawned on me that I need to be sustainable for myself,” he says.
As he prepared for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in 2021, his father contacted a family friend who co-owned ICMA Professional Services, an audit and consulting firm with government clients, including Delta State. Posted to the state, Ibrahim secured a placement at its office in Asaba, the state’s capital.
ICMA used Excel to reconcile government revenue payments and identify the departments they belonged to. Ibrahim then built an application that used text processing and patterns in previous transaction descriptions to classify new payments, leaving accountants to verify the results rather than sort transactions manually.
By the end of his service year, the company wanted to retain him. Its offer included an apartment and a monthly salary of ₦200,000 ($148.7) up from the ₦30,000 ($22.31) he had initially received. Ibrahim, then 23, declined.
“I got an offer letter from them, but I wanted to do real tech stuff, not what they wanted me to do,” he says. “That experience made me realise the value of my skills and the importance of solving problems wherever I find myself. When you can connect what you know how to do to a problem that needs solving, people begin to see the value you bring as a professional.”
Learning to build with a team
After declining the offer, Ibrahim returned to Ibadan in 2022 as a full-time employee at Crop2Cash, an agritech company where he had completed his industrial training in 2018.
Crop2Cash was building a financial platform to help smallholder farmers document their activities and use the records to access grants and loans. Ibrahim built backend analytics to process the data and a targeting engine that ranked farmers by yield.
At Crop2Cash, he joined a larger team of project managers and DevOps engineers, after years of working largely alone.
“I learned collaboration because I had already been working alone all this while,” he says. “Before, everything was always done by me, because I liked the solo journey. But then collaboration changed everything. The things that come out of collaboration are usually very massive.”
He also began to appreciate the relationships that came with teamwork. “That’s actually when I knew that there was the human side to this technical thing we do,” he says, describing it as his first career family. He was there for less than a year.
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in 2022, Ibrahim said he followed its development closely and began building projects that incorporated AI. The technology soon took much of his attention.
Finding his way into AI
Ibrahim had read about machine learning, but ChatGPT’s 2022 release changed how he thought about building software.
He began publishing AI prototypes on his website, fibdev.com. In 2023, one caught the attention of a UK cybersecurity company seeking a system to train financial institutions’ staff to recognise social engineering attempts.
It wanted to move beyond chatbots and simulate phone calls with bank employees. Ibrahim therefore built a demonstration connecting a conversational AI agent to a phone line, prompting the company to approach him.
“It was really exciting for me because this was my first global recognition since I met John,” he says. “This was 2023, and I am getting to speak with someone abroad again who wants me to come work with him.”
The company initially offered him $500 a month. Ibrahim asked for double, though he worried the request might cost him the opportunity. It eventually offered between $600 and $800, with the possibility of a raise if his work went well. He accepted and joined Bilic UK as an AI engineer in October 2023.
At Bilic, he worked on the social engineering simulation platform, which was piloted with financial institutions. He later became interim Chief Technology Officer while the company’s chief technology officer (CTO) was away, an experience that taught him to think beyond engineering and consider product decisions.
Convinced he could build a company of his own, Ibrahim left Bilic in March 2024 to found Mock0.com, a platform that helped e-commerce businesses build product recommendation systems and AI-powered search without developing their own models.
He applied to Y Combinator but was unsuccessful. Without the funding needed to sustain the business, Mock0 eventually ran out of money.
“I absolutely loved the idea. I was so convinced we would get into YC because, at the time, I hadn’t seen anyone else doing quite what we were doing,” he says.
After Mock0 folded, Ibrahim continued publishing AI prototypes. Founders began approaching him for help, and he started consulting for $50 to $200 an hour. The work brought him into contact with more founders.
Building for AI and real estate
One consulting connection led Ibrahim to Jide Ogunjobi, former Chief Technology Officer of the mobility startup, Moove, who was building a company in the United States called Context Data and looking for an AI engineer.
Ibrahim says Jide contacted him after someone shared his profile in a group. He initially joined as a consulting AI engineer. After three months, Jide asked him to come on full-tim, and Ibrahim joined Context Data in September 2024.
Context Data was building infrastructure that made company data available to generative AI systems and agents. Ibrahim worked across data and agents, developing techniques to help models understand that information.
“My job was to make the model understand the data, so I did some context engineering, then invented some new techniques that people really loved.”
He left Context Data in October 2025.
By January 2026, a recommendation from Julia Kingsley, a former colleague and mentor, had led him to another role. Zach Schofel, OpenInsured’s founder, was building an AI platform to analyse real estate data and brought Ibrahim on to develop its minimum viable product (MVP) for potential investors.
Ibrahim negotiated equity and salary increases tied to milestones. Schofel made an exception by hiring him remotely, he says, although the company wanted its entire team in New York.
“I needed to prove him and Julia right,” he says.
It became his hardest project. With only two engineers on the team, Ibrahim worked 13 to 15 hours a day to organise and interpret difficult real estate data.
“I would say it is my hardest project so far because the real estate data is so rough and so messed up and you have to get an AI system to understand it,” he says.
Four months after Ibrahim joined, he says OpenInsured raised a $5 million seed round. About six weeks later, it raised another $3 million.
For Ibrahim, the significance went beyond the funding. “It was not about the money. It was the fact that I worked on something that birthed that kind of money that really made the whole thing really cool,” he says.
After the funding, Ibrahim was expected to relocate to New York, but attempts to secure a US visa were unsuccessful because of the visa ban on Nigerians. Given his role and the sensitivity of the work, he says continuing remotely was not feasible. His contract ended in August 2026.
“We parted on good terms. I sold my equity and the company also showered me with gifts,” he says. “I encountered some of the most humbling problems in my entire career that made me question my ability. But I am grateful to have worked with people who challenged me and pushed my standards higher.”
Building beyond code
Building AI products was challenging, but working across time zones meant 12- 13-hour days. His offer letter described a “6-day work week grind culture”, which he initially considered his strong suit.
“I actually suffered some headaches that even paralysed some parts of me whenever I had them. The headaches were really terrible, and I would say it was quite scary,” he says.
Still, the difficult problems kept him engaged. “I love the challenge. AI has some of the most exciting problems we have ever seen. I enjoy working on these problems and how much better they make me as a builder,” he says.
He is now more conscious of the need to protect his health and no longer wants the long engineering hours.
He now helps startups and organisations build with AI while developing a platform to identify and upskill “10x plus one engineers”: people who can do more than prompt AI tools and turn founders’ ideas into products customers care about.
“Coding is no longer the reason why a company will hire you because anyone can use Claude and ChatGPT to code,” he says. “They are looking for someone they can give their idea to and tell what to build, and he would build something that customers would care about.”
Ibrahim ultimately wants to become a founder himself, although he has yet to settle on an idea. For now, he is focused on helping other founders build while figuring out what he wants to create next.