Nigerian-born engineer develops AI platform to prevent online fraud

In a world where digital commerce increasingly depends on trust between strangers, a Nigerian-born engineer is using artificial intelligence to redesign how credibility is established online. Henry Uwabor, a United States based software engineer, is the founder of Finaive, an AI-powered marketplace built to prevent online fraud by verifying trust before transactions are completed.

Uwabor’s work has already drawn global attention. His startup has been admitted into the NVIDIA Inception Program and AWS Activate, initiatives that support high-potential technology companies with advanced infrastructure and technical resources. He and his team were also selected into the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship in the United States after a competitive review process, underscoring the platform’s technical and commercial promise.

Before launching Finaive, Uwabor worked at Amazon, where he contributed to predictive decision-making systems. He had earlier founded Realmlll, a student-focused social platform that earned national recognition in Nigeria. These experiences, he said, sharpened his focus on building systems that combine scale, data, and human behaviour.

The motivation behind Finaive, however, predates his work abroad. Uwabor traces the idea back to Nigeria’s energetic digital marketplace, an ecosystem powered by entrepreneurs, informal vendors, and fast-moving online businesses. From Instagram stores run out of private homes to traders operating in Lagos’ Computer Village, he observed a consistent reality of digital trade: transactions often rely on personal trust in the absence of strong pre-transaction verification systems.

According to Uwabor, this environment reveals not a failure of character, but a gap in infrastructure. When buyers send money without assurance and sellers dispatch goods without guaranteed payment, growth becomes cautious and opportunity constrained. He believes the real challenge lies in systems that respond to fraud only after it occurs, rather than preventing it at the outset.

At the core of Finaive’s solution is AI-TrustScore, a machine-learning model designed to assess the reliability of buyers and sellers before any exchange takes place. Uwabor describes it as trust intelligence, similar in concept to a credit score, but based on verified actions rather than online sentiment. The system evaluates identity verification, transaction history, and delivery performance to build a dynamic measure of credibility.

To ground this process in real-world data, Finaive integrates with logistics partners, enabling the platform to confirm whether goods were shipped and delivered as promised. Trust scores update in real time, reflecting actual performance rather than claims or marketing-driven reviews.

Uwabor noted that traditional rating systems often reward perception over execution. By separating sentiment from behaviour, Finaive focuses on what users do, not what they say. Where logistics data shows repeated delivery failures, the trust score declines regardless of positive reviews. For him, the movement of goods provides one of the clearest signals of accountability in digital commerce.

Uwabor believes that solutions developed within high-growth markets like Nigeria can scale globally. “When you build for environments that move fast and operate at scale,” he said, “you end up creating systems that work anywhere.”