ELMHURST, IL (JLN) — September 14, 2026: David Umeh recently returned to the United States from Nigeria, where he is weeks, if not days, away from regulatory approval from Nigerian market regulators to launch a futures exchange offering prediction markets. Umeh’s Clouty Inc. is in the final stage to become the first Nigerian SEC-approved regulated prediction market, operating under the trade name Sabi.
Umeh pursued launching a U.S.-designated contract market registration and had the CFTC pre-vet his plans. However, he was missing one piece: the capital to get the exchange off the ground. This young African American entrepreneur found in Nigeria not just an easier place to raise money, but a chance to corner an enormous, untapped market: the world’s sixth most populous country, with a hyper-engaged, famously polarizing news cycle. This is a country where Dangote just launched Africa’s largest-ever IPO, and where NGX was, just months ago, the best-performing stock market in the world.
A Nigerian private equity group has backed Umeh’s Clouty exchange. He pivoted from his original music idea, embracing the tailwinds of prediction markets. Nigeria will hold presidential elections in 2027 and has four well-known candidates running, giving Umeh’s prediction market the perfect event to capture the country’s imagination and teach it about prediction markets. But it is not just a presidential election; it is the 2027 Nigerian election supercycle, with a presidential election as well as 469 National Assembly seats and 36 governorships up for grabs.
Exberry provides the matching technology, trades are cleared through NG Clear (Nigeria’s CCP), and client funds are held in segregated custody. The exchange offers a disintermediated model, though Umeh says it will also facilitate brokerage firms.
The exchange has its own app, Sabi Markets (sabi means ‘to know’ in Nigerian Pidgin), available on iOS and Android marketplaces. Umeh has negotiated with four broadcast networks to carry the exchange’s prices: Nairametrics, Arise TV, Channels TV, and TurnTable Charts, and counting.
Umeh, who admitted to learning industry history, language, people, and firms by studying MarketsWiki, has over the years built relationships with advisors across NYSE, CBOE, CME, NGX, and Bloomberg. He is seeking capital to replace the Nigerian private equity firm, with the goal of improving the deal terms. He has the right to buy back the PE group’s stake within 12 months of the original deal, signed in December 2025. A unique quirk of the deal for new investors is that a portion of their money, used as regulatory capital, can be invested in interest-bearing accounts that earn enough to self-fund operating costs, Umeh said. He is seeking $5 million in capital to replace the PE investors and launch the exchange.
I first met Umeh in 2021 at the FIA EXPO, the first post-COVID-19 EXPO conference, where he saw the MarketsWiki Education logo on a drawstring bag, connected with members of the JLN team, and then met with me. In 2022, Clouty took second place in FIA’s Innovator’s Pavilion at EXPO. He is a young entrepreneur I am not betting against.
