How Vectar Energy moved from selling solar generators to building carbon-market infrastructure

In 2025, Biodun Ogunleye, the Lagos State Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources, said that about 30,000 deaths occur annually in the state due to exposure to carbon monoxide. Growing up, Deborah Fadeyi had seen how generators became part of everyday life, even when their consequences could be fatal. It became personal in 1999 when she lost a friend to carbon monoxide poisoning from generator fumes.

“I was young, but that experience stayed with me, and Nigeria still hasn’t gone past that phase,” she told TechCabal in an interview in September. “We still hear in the news that people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Generators were so normal growing up that nobody really questioned what it meant for people to depend on them for something so fundamental as electricity, until it began to kill them.”

Twenty years later, she founded Vectar Energy, a climate finance company registered and operating in the United Kingdom. Vectar Energy began as a maker of solar-powered portable power stations designed to displace small petrol generators. Today, its core product is ecoWise, a platform that brings small solar projects together into a single portfolio, helping them access carbon markets they could not enter on their own.

Day 1: She wanted to build a better generator

If petrol generators were the problem, Fadeyi wanted to build a better alternative. Before Vectar Energy became a climate finance company, she was experimenting with ways to make solar power practical enough to replace petrol generators.

Her first attempt was in 2019, through an earlier venture called YettyFlames. Fadeyi was building locally fabricated solar-generator systems, drawing on what she was learning about the energy needs of Nigerian households and small businesses. She described the early systems as crude compared with what Vectar would eventually produce, but said they gave her firsthand experience with the people she wanted to serve.

“That part of the business was super important to us because it put us directly in front of the customers, and it helped us to challenge the realities that they were facing,” Fadeyi said.

By 2020, she had decided to turn that work into a more structured business. She founded Vectar Energy and began building it on her own. Its first product was the Vectar Eco, a portable solar power station designed to replace the small petrol generators commonly known as I better pass my neighbour generators.

“The idea was simple: create a practical solar and better battery alternative to the small petrol generators that homes and businesses used every day,” she said. “Getting from that idea to something commercially viable was much less simple.”

Turning that ambition into a product people could buy required money, and Fadeyi said Vectar Energy was raising funds to develop the solar power stations. The team also had to work through the business of making hardware, including choosing the right battery configurations, sizing the solar panels, testing components and designing a unit that was portable and powerful enough for the appliances customers needed. What kept her going, she said, went back to 1999.

“I told myself that I hope this doesn’t happen to someone else,” she said. “I guess this is the part that I’m playing to enable that future that I once dreamed of, where it became a responsibility from my best friend losing her life because of something that could be avoided.”

Day 500: Making solar cheaper and building it are different

Getting the solar power stations into the market meant a rethink of how Vectar produced them. Fadeyi said her team realised that locally fabricated units could end up costing more than their target customers could afford. They took the design to China and then began importing semi-assembled units that would be completed in Nigeria.

By 2023, Vectar was ready for the market. It had paying customers in Nigeria and was generating revenue from its portable power stations. The company developed different capacities, including the Vectar Eco and Vectar Eco Mini, recognising that a household, a trader and a small business did not have the same power needs or ability to pay.

However, as much as its customers recognised the benefits of switching from petrol to solar generators, Fadeyi said they still struggled to afford the upfront cost. She stated that Vectar explored partnerships with lenders such as Credit Direct and AltPower to offer instalment payments, but many prospective customers struggled to meet the credit requirements.

“The credit landscape in Nigeria is still developing. People would go to such platforms in the hope that they would get [credit], but they would be laden with different and stringent requirements that they might not be able to meet,” Fadeyi said.

Vectar then tried to offer its own non-interest instalment plans to customers in Lagos and Abuja. Still, spreading the payments over time did not make the stations affordable enough for many of the people the company wanted to reach, according to Fadeyi.

We realised that we were solving the problem, but not at the scale that it needed to be solved,” she said.

In 2024, Vectar Energy began working on SUNWISE alongside Vectar Eco. SUNWISE was an initiative designed to make portable solar systems more accessible to nano and small businesses without requiring full payment upfront. The company explored rent-to-own arrangements starting at ₦2,000 ($1.49) daily. That year, Habeeb Mustapha formally joined Vectar as chief technology officer in April, strengthening its technical team. He would later become a co-founder.

Fadeyi said she was also beginning to discover if the environmental benefits of the solar systems could generate revenue and help lower the cost of solar.

“We had begun asking whether the environmental value produced by solar systems could itself help solve the affordability problem,” Fadeyi said. “If a solar system displaces petrol or diesel and avoids carbon emissions, could that environmental impact become another revenue stream? Could that revenue lower the cost of the system or help finance additional installations?”

2024 became a year of overlap for Vectar. It was still building and selling physical solar products, but it was also beginning to develop the technology that would eventually take it into climate finance.

Day 1000: Selling the evidence, not the equipment

After years of trying to make clean energy affordable for Nigerian households and small businesses, Fadeyi had come to a realisation that the opportunity might be in making the environmental benefits of solar projects generate money.

“What if the individual installation did not have to be the unit entering the carbon market? What if we aggregated many installations and eventually many independent developers through one common infrastructure?” she said.

This became ecoWise, Vectar’s carbon-market infrastructure platform. ecoWise brings together smaller solar projects in a single portfolio, monitors the electricity they generate and the emissions they avoid, and helps their developers access carbon markets. ecoWise provides the infrastructure to collectively navigate the process of carbon certification and credit sales. For this to work, Vectar had to produce evidence that carbon-market institutions and buyers could trust. That meant developing the technology to monitor installations and understanding the requirements of carbon standards.

“ecoWise increasingly became about assurance infrastructure rather than simply an emissions calculator,” Fadeyi said. “It was also during this period that we began doing the much less glamorous work required to create an actual carbon programme: methodologies, eligibility criteria, developer agreements, carbon rights, monitoring plans, safeguards, Gold Standard requirements and the programme architecture necessary to aggregate independent developers.”

Fadeyi described 2025 as the year Vectar made the transition from being principally a solar product company to becoming a climate finance and environmental-market infrastructure company. By early 2026, Vectar’s legacy solar product business had served more than 150 customers and generated roughly ₦80 million in cumulative revenue. However, Fadeyi was now focused on helping solar developers earn additional revenue from the electricity they already generated.

Vectar says it has onboarded 35 megawatt-peak (MWp) of distributed solar projects across Nigeria, with a 50 MWp cohort being prepared for validation and verification. Fadeyi expects the first carbon-credit payout to participating solar projects in January 2027. The technology supporting the programme has also evolved. Vectar is developing ecoWise as a hybrid digital measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) system, combining physical Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring with virtual and API-based integrations. This allows the platform to collect data from solar installations using different inverters and monitoring systems.

**ecoWise hardware for measuring solar output. Image source: ecoWise**

“We realised quite early that distributed solar is too heterogeneous for a single monitoring approach to work for every developer,” she said. “Different projects have different inverters, monitoring systems, data formats and operating environments, so the infrastructure has to be flexible enough to accommodate that diversity while still producing consistent, auditable evidence.”

Fadeyi said carbon credits from the projects could sell for as much as $50 each, depending on the market and the quality of the credits. She also said Vectar was working with MSCI, a global financial data and research company that provides independent ratings of carbon projects. In 2026, Vectar entered the International Renewable Energy Certificate (I-REC(E)) ecosystem, giving qualifying projects another route to environmental-market revenue, as it allows buyers to substantiate claims about their use of renewable electricity.

Vectar is also working towards setting up in Sierra Leone and Madagascar in 2027, with ambitions to replicate its infrastructure across other African markets. The company has travelled a long way from the portable solar power station it began building in 2020. However, the underlying problem of making clean energy a viable alternative to the generators that power homes and businesses across Nigeria has remained the same.

“Day one, we started with how do we make clean energy affordable enough to replace generators,” Fadey said. “Now we’re asking the question: how do we build the financial infrastructure that makes our energy transition scalable?”

“Federal university lecturers rarely repeat exam questions verbatim; what they repeat are core topics.” When Dare Adeola and Olamide Onigbanjo set out to build UniBeta at the University of Lagos, they made the quintessential early-stage mistake: trying to build an “everything app.” They crammed timetable scheduling, street vox pops, peer tutoring, and a campus marketplace hawking thrift streetwear and perfumes into a single platform.The result? The outsourced mobile app arrived riddled with bugs, repeatedly failed Apple App Store and Google Play reviews, and nearly wiped out their savings. Worse still, they ran headfirst into the brutal reality of Nigerian edtech: massive traffic spikes two weeks before exams, followed by total ghost-town churn the second papers are submitted. Instead of shutting down, they stripped away the bloat. Recognising that global chatbots like ChatGPT struggle to make sense of photocopied course packs and idiosyncratic local syllabuses, they rebuilt UniBeta around algorithmic revision—training AI to spot high-yield topic clusters from past papers. For TechCabal, OPEYEMI KAREEM goes inside UniBeta’s bruising journey from a failed campus super-app to a targeted AI study tool.

By their second year, most university students have settled into a rhythm: gauging which lecturers demand the most vigilance, where to unearth past question papers, and how to survive exam seasons.

Dare Oluwayanmife Adeola arrived through a less conventional door. He entered the second-year Urban and Regional Planning class at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) via JUPEB—an intensive foundation programme.

That rigorous preparatory year forced him to engineer a disciplined personal schedule to balance his coursework alongside an active commercial hustle.

“Most students I observed were either sacrificing their grades to make ends meet, or burning out socially just to keep up academically,” Adeola told TechCabal. “University is supposed to be a total experience. You shouldn’t have to compromise your degree to fund your life, or vice versa.”

In 2023, Adeola teamed up with Olamide Onigbanjo, then a Chemical Engineering undergraduate, to build UniBeta.

The initial vision was an ambitious, sprawling student super-app combining timetable scheduling, CGPA trackers, peer tutoring, career advice, and an e-commerce marketplace for student vendors.

Three years, several false starts, and a failed mobile deployment later, UniBeta has stripped away the excess to focus on using artificial intelligence to help undergraduates pass their exams.

Three years and several iterations later, UniBeta now uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help Nigerian university students prepare for exams.

Day 1: The three experiments

UniBeta did not begin as software. It began as an offline study schedule shared among friends.

Encouraged by their response, the founders broke their broader campus ambitions into three low-cost offline experiments.

The first test tackled academics. Adeola recruited first-class students across faculties at UNILAG to run targeted tutorials for junior cohorts.

The premise was straightforward: undergraduates often grasp complex concepts faster when taught by peers who have recently sat the same exams under the same lecturers.

“We started organising tutorials across campus, and I was observing their attendance to see whether people actually wanted to learn,” Adeola recalled.

The second experiment focused on community media. The founders launched Inside Uni, a campus lifestyle channel producing street interviews, vox pops, and relatable video content. It quickly drew an audience, giving student creators an outlet while providing UniBeta with direct, organic campus distribution.

The third pillar was commerce. With student attention secured, UniBeta began monetising by selling promotional slots to undergraduate entrepreneurs running side businesses.

“We had students hawking everything from thrift fashion and streetwear brands to perfumes and jewellery,” Adeola said.

Bolstered by traction across all three channels, the founders made a classic early-stage mistake: attempting to merge disparate products into a single app.

With an assembled team of three software engineers, a presenter, a videographer, and a video editor, they set out to code an all-in-one platform that tried to cater to academics, media, and commerce simultaneously.

Day 500: The app that didn’t work

Translating three distinct experiments into a functional mobile build proved disastrous. Bootstrapping with their own savings, the founders paid external contract developers to engineer the frontend and backend architectures.

Months later, the delivered code was riddled with bugs. The build repeatedly failed App Store and Google Play review guidelines, falling short of basic stability, interface responsiveness, and data compliance standards.

“It was really discouraging to start again from scratch. This incident really made me consider abandoning the idea because I didn’t even know where to start from,” Adeola said.

To keep momentum alive, the founders salvaged the only functional module—the vendor marketplace—releasing it as a lightweight web application while hiring a new engineer to rebuild the underlying code.

The crisis forced a critical product reassessment. The super-app premise had divided user attention and complicated retention: advertisers, lifestyle viewers, and studying undergraduates each operated on entirely different usage cycles.

More fundamentally, the founders ran headfirst into the central structural defect of Nigerian edtech: extreme seasonality.

“The biggest lesson we learned was that the need for edtech platforms, especially for Nigerian university students, is seasonal,” Adeola said. “We noticed a high influx of students when exams were closer and a high churn when exams were over.”

To survive, UniBeta needed a tool compelling enough to deliver concentrated value during those critical exam cycles without requiring excessive operational overhead. That search led to artificial intelligence.

**UniBeta dashboard. Image source: UniBeta**

Day 1000: UniBeta bets on AI

Rather than acting as a static repository of PDF notes and past questions, UniBeta pivoted toward automated syntheses.

In October 2025, the startup launched UniBeta AI.

The tool allows undergraduates to upload unstructured course materials and historical exam papers.

Its model then parses the text to identify syllabus recurring patterns, automatically generating contextual flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, and modular summaries.

“We noticed that most of the past questions from federal universities don’t repeat the questions; they repeat topics,” Adeola said. “So we’re able to identify those topics and then help students to study those topics.”

The pivot put UniBeta in competition with general-purpose chatbots and AI tools built specifically for education, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, Adeola believes UniBeta’s advantage is in building around the realities of African university students.

“What we’re trying to do is to make it more niche towards Nigerian or African universities rather than what other products would do for a larger share of the market,” Adeola said. “UniBeta AI would be more tailored to what a Nigerian university student actually understands and would actually be of value to them.”

UniBeta has a free tier, and other paid plans cost between ₦2,000 and ₦6,000. The business also generates revenue from events, Inside Uni promotions, and sponsored advertising. The company has also secured an angel investment for an undisclosed amount in September 2025.

UniBeta said its next challenge is distribution, as it is in talked with the National Universities Commission about building a unified data structure for accredited Nigerian universities.

If the plan comes together, the founders hope it will make it possible to take UniBeta to operate across the country without having to build a separate presence from scratch on every campus.

The company also said that the team is working on features including slide creation and voice tutorials that could turn a student’s uploaded materials into what resembles a one-on-one lesson. The longer-term ambition is to build an AI product that understands how Nigerian students study and the academic systems they have to navigate.

“For an edtech platform to succeed, we also need to solve other problems students have outside the classroom so we can be relevant round the clock,” he said.

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