Exactly eight years ago, a coterie of friends met to discuss building a brand focused on listening to people, and then providing emotional support to these people based on their emotional needs. There were five of them, all professionals in their respective fields who desired to take advantage of Instagram’s growing popularity particularly in the African space, to build what they imagined would go on to become a global brand. Only one of them would leave that meeting and go on to actually build the brand they had envisioned. His name is Izuchukwu Ojukwu, popularly known as ‘Dear Mac’ especially, by members of the community he has successfully, built.
Izuchukwu’s story is remarkable, losing his father at 13, he was then single handedly raised by his strict, disciplinarian mother, a widowed mother of 4. Navigating financial difficulties meant that Izuchukwu did not have the rosiest upbringing. For example, to buy his first phone, Izuchukwu took on a bricklaying job in the streets, as well as other menial jobs. This device though, meant that he could begin publishing his written work to friends of his facebook community and this diligence paid off, giving rise to his first job, a writing gig with the now defunct, Green News Nigeria. It was whilst working his new role as a Staff Writer that Izuchukwu would develop his new mien; Dear Mac, an alter ego that became the birth of something special.
Dear Mac started engaging people by putting out hand written notes on relationship issues, setting up weekly challenges, and providing frequent updates on matches done as well as featuring feedback from blossoming relationships and soon, monthly, hundreds of individuals would come to Dear Mac the matchmaker, seeking solution to their relationship issues whether those issues be psychological or physical, that is, they were lonely.
What began as a single matchmaker manually matching members of his community, only kept on growing and in 2022, the private matchmaking company Izuchukwu had built, Dear Mac Global, was relegated to birth into existence Nirvanae, a full blown tech company, with a primary focus on building technology that fosters better connections. Thus, the phoenix that is Nirvanae indeed arose from the ashes of Dear Mac Global.
Fast forward to 2024, and after Nirvanae’s successful MVP release, this reporter met up with the team at the Nirvanae headquarters to discuss plans for the future and as usual, Izuchukwu glowingly spoke about how far the company had come and plans in place for the future.
Nirvanae was the first company, probably globally, to successfully implement Open AI’s API as an LLM in their beta app, but with a focus on responding to Nirvanae themed questions. It was released to a closed group of people in December of 2023, and the team of engineers and computer scientists observed, in awe, its potential and what it could achieve when truly unleashed within their own ecosystem. Speaking with Izuchukwu, this writer was keen to know what Nirvanae planned to do with AI considering the current overhaul of systems as AI continues to make its mark in the tech scene. This reporter also quizzed Izuchukwu about the absence of AI in their most recent release and it was very interesting, the insight that I gleaned. Globally, lots of jobs have been replaced by AI as AI agents continue to get better and better at performing functions of entire customer care teams, in half the time.
To quote Nirvanae’s CEO, “We have been able to secure some funding from Village Seed Capital, a fund that aims at providing Angel investment to African founders building interesting companies and with that fund, we have focused on building our own proprietary AI by training it on our unique data. But we need lots of data as language models are trained on huge data deposits and also it requires lots of internal data because our AI Agent which we would be calling Marc AI, would not just be a passive AI that waits to be triggered by users within our system, but a proactive one, learning about the user and performing up to 90 percent of former match coach or handler tasks. What this means is that our Marc AI would be performing roles like, setting up a user on dates, providing date coaching, providing emotional support after bad dates, directly suggesting great content to users, providing match reports, and in time, even providing sales reports for users who do business within our app. Our MVP is a way for us to get the data we need, by also keeping track of what users are doing within our system and what we can automate even further, using AI. We want a simple and effective system, that our users can easily, connect with.”
Izuchukwu shared some designs, explaining some of the upgrades that would be available to the over ten thousand users currently on Nirvanae, and it is truly remarkable what the company has in store. From content integration and infinity scrolling mechanisms, to virtual dates and virtual games with partners, Nirvanae hopes to become a force to be reckoned with as far as social networking is concerned in Nigeria.
The app also features a psychometric testing interphase, where users are tested on their mental readiness to be in committed relationships before suggesting measures such as engaging the AI therapist in app or a Nirvanae employed, psychologist depending on a user’s subscription level.
To quote Izuchukwu, “In Africa, not a lot of attention is paid to mental health especially considering the cost and the fact that we are still a third world country. However, there is a huge population of Africans who require our service especially Africans in the diaspora. We offer low cost mental health therapy sessions, and further therapize our clients by analysing their past and present relationships, and the sort of connections they require to build lasting relationships for the future. Their experience in the app would, in time, be significantly altered based on their personality type.’
Nirvanae is well poised to build a significant social networking behemoth, and only time would tell, if the company meets this expectation.
