Meet Asanato Mayor, the self-taught 16-year-old building four digital products and a tech company

At 16, Asanato Mayor is building four digital products from Jos, Plateau State, not Lagos. He works alone and is still in secondary school, and he says he taught himself to code.

He started at 13, learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript on his own, with ChatGPT and Gemini as tutors. “Nobody taught me. I learnt it myself, and ChatGPT and Gemini were my tutors,” he says.

His mother introduced him to the basics of computers and the internet, and he says his school did not teach him to code. “The school has a computer lab, but I didn’t learn anything there,” he says.

Now he wants to turn that into a company, Mayor Group, built around people his own age.

A company for under-18s

Mayor says he is deliberately building for, and plans to work with, people under 18. “I’m very intentional about building for people under 18 and working with them. The story of doing this at such a young age is what people will want to hear,” he says.

His goal is for Mayor Group to become one of the best-known startups owned by a team under 18, in Nigeria, Africa or globally.

For now, that team is only him. The company is not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), and he says his age is the obstacle.

“I am under 18, so CAC won’t let me register on my own. I will register through my parents once money starts coming in,” he says.

The four products under Mayor Group

Notice is an online notice board. Creators post a notice and share it through a QR code, and anyone who scans it can view it for free. He plans to offer a monthly subscription for creators. It launched earlier but has been suspended, and it has no users yet.

“We launched it, but I had to suspend it because there are some issues I need to fix,” he says.

Mivo AI is a chatbot with a normal mode and an educational mode that helps students study, such as walking them through quadratic equations. It runs on an engine he built, called the Miano Series, which draws on APIs from other AI providers. It has not launched, and he expects to release it in the first week of 2027.

Zango is a social network for neighbours, inspired by Nextdoor, a foreign app. It uses geolocation to place users in groups for their area. An AI moderator, Obsidian Cluster, gives strikes for abuse or obscene content and removes users after 10 strikes, with a human review for appeals. He expects to launch between October 18 and 23, 2026.

Zeero is a marketplace and job board for beginners. It will not handle payments; buyers and sellers agree on terms in a chat and pay outside the app. There is no launch date.

“LinkedIn and Upwork ask for too much. I wanted something a beginner with no experience can just walk into,” he says.

What came before Mayor Group

The company has had several names: Asacorp, Asterix, Maytech and now Mayor Group. “Maytech would have limited us to tech. Mayor is my name, and group means a chain of industries,” he says. It will start with technology and move into physical businesses later.

Before that, he sold AI-generated designs from age 12, but says several clients did not pay him. His first app, Rivol, built at 14 to connect under-18 builders, closed after almost a year because it never attracted users or any funds.

Read more: Nigeria’s proposed under-16 social media ban: The hidden cost to youth digital literacy

His main lesson came from that period. “People won’t help you unless you have proof or money,” he confesses.

His advice to other young builders outside the big cities is simple. “Never give up. If Mark Zuckerberg had given up, we wouldn’t have Facebook,” he says.