Pitch-IT is a cohort based startup pre-incubation program designed to help young entrepreneurs transform promising ideas into viable, structured, and market-ready businesses, while providing selected founders with access to early-stage funding through grants and pre-seed investment.
Founded by Dopals Technologies, Pitch-IT focuses on supporting startups, particularly young people and women across Northeastern Nigeria, with the practical knowledge, mentorship, tools, networks, and capital they need to build sustainable businesses.
The programme takes founders beyond simply having an idea. Through structured training, mentorship, business development sessions, product development support, and access to funding opportunities, participants are guided through the critical stages of validating their ideas, understanding their customers, developing their products, building effective business models, and preparing for growth.
From Ideas to Investment
A key component of Pitch-IT is its early-stage funding pathway.
Rather than ending with training and certificates, the programme is designed to give promising founders a pathway toward actual capital. Based on the maturity, potential, and performance of participating startups, selected businesses can receive non-dilutive grants to help them validate and grow their ideas, while businesses demonstrating stronger investment potential can progress toward pre-seed investment.
This creates a pathway where founders can move from:
Idea → Validation → Business Development → Pitch → Grant / Pre-Seed Investment → Growth
The programme’s funding component is designed to help address one of the biggest challenges facing early-stage entrepreneurs: access to the right capital at the right stage.
The Bigger Vision
Pitch-IT is more than a training programme. It is part of a broader vision to build a stronger pipeline of innovative businesses emerging from Northeastern Nigeria.
The long-term goal is to support startups capable of creating jobs, attracting investment, solving local problems, and competing beyond their immediate markets.
Through its pre-incubation and future accelerator pathway, Pitch-IT aims to support 50 startups during its pre-incubation phase and 40 startups through its accelerator phase, with an ambitious focus on job creation, investment, and the development of high-growth companies.
My Role
As the founder of Dopals Technologies and the initiator of Pitch-IT, I have been involved in shaping the programme’s vision, structure, partnerships, fundraising strategy, funding model, and overall entrepreneurial development framework.
Pitch-IT represents one of my commitments to using technology, entrepreneurship, and ecosystem development to create opportunities for young people and build businesses that can have lasting economic impact.
Pitch-IT is ultimately about turning potential into businesses and giving the most promising founders the support and capital to turn those businesses into impact.
