Who Is Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen is a Nigerian full stack software developer and game creator. She became one of the most talked-about young tech founders in Nigeria in October 2026 when she built and launched Lagos Life, a browser game that passed one million players within days. She goes online as Shalom Rayhamen, with the X handle @Shalom_HeyEliy. She is the co-founder of Vatar, the company building Lagos Life and other virtual worlds.
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen Real Name
Her real name is Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen. Some Nigerian newspapers, including Arise and BusinessDay, report her full name as Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen. Her LinkedIn profile, however, introduces her as Ijeoma Shalom Mathew, a full stack developer with almost a decade of experience. TechPoint and TechCrier also use the surname Mathew in their reporting, while her own X account and the Lagos Life website use Shalom Rayhamen. So her documented names are Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen and Ijeoma Shalom Mathew, and her public working name is Shalom Rayhamen. No other names have been verified for her.
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen Age
As of 2026 October, Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen is 26 years old. That means she was born in the year 1999 or 2000. She said that in 2018, at the age of 18, she took a six-month internship to learn to code, which fits that birth window. The exact date of her birth has not been disclosed. She turned 18 in 2018, and by October 2026 she had nearly a decade of software development experience.
Nationality
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen is Nigerian by nationality. She was born in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State in the south of Nigeria. Her mother lives in Abia State, and Rayhamen spent time in Aba, Abia State, where she learned to code. She is Igbo by background through her Abia roots. She was granted a UK Global Talent visa in 2023, a visa granted to individuals who are recognised as leaders or potential leaders in their field. Her LinkedIn profile states she is based in Belfast and works for Napier AI, and that she has a background of education at Nexford University. She remains very much Nigerian, even as she creates products around Nigerian life. She posts about her work on X and Facebook, where she also teaches kids to code.
Career
Rayhamen’s career in tech began under difficult conditions. At the age of 18, she received a scholarship in 2018 to undertake a six-month internship at the LearnFactory in Aba, Abia State, where she acquired software development skills. Her equipment was a Chromebook that was not designed for coding. Her mother had given it to her for her 18th birthday. Learning was also difficult due to power cuts and slow internet, so she also visited local tech hubs just to access electricity and Wi-Fi. She learned more after the internship and continued to develop. A stranger from Malaysia reached out to her in 2021 via one of her Facebook posts regarding teaching children to code. The stranger said his boss wanted to talk to her. That conversation led to paid work, and the money let her buy a proper laptop, a bulky device that made noise the moment you opened it. She has worked as a software engineer for almost a decade. She currently works at Napier AI in the UK and has developed an AI project called Eliy, which is also the name of her company. Prior to Lagos Life, her personal projects were not very successful, and she was about to abandon her ambitions of becoming a product creator. She saw a browser game called Lagos Run by Opeyemi Adeniran and decided to create a life simulation game set in Lagos the night of 30 September 2026. That night she began that for fun, and with the help of AI tools she coded, and the next morning, she launched. She told Zikoko, that she took about 8 hours to build Lagos Life and that the game was very popular in Nigeria by the time she woke up. As of 5 October 2026, the game’s dashboard reported 1.2 million players with over 100,000 online at peak, while later reports claimed the player count was more than 4 million. She co-founded Vatar Inc. to operate the game. On 9 October 2026, Vatar announced a 500,000 US dollar angel investment at a reported valuation of 10 million US dollars. Among the investors was Flutterwave’s Chief Executive Officer, Olugbenga Agboola, whose fund, Resilience17, was the one that invested in the project. She said she will be leaving her job to work on Lagos Life full-time due to the game’s revenue. She’s also branching out and wants to reach beyond Lagos, with versions of the game for Abuja and Port Harcourt, and she wants to develop Vatar into a bigger game company that creates experiences around Nigerian cities and culture.
Lagos Life Game
Lagos Life, also called Naija Life Sim, is a free multiplayer browser-based life simulation game set in a virtual Lagos. It launched on 1 October 2026, which is Nigeria’s Independence Day, at lagoslife.app, and it is also available on the Google Play Store. The game was built by Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen in under 12 hours, with AI assistance, after she was inspired by The Sims 3, which she grew up playing, and by Lagos Run. In the game, players create a virtual life in Lagos. They can get jobs, pay rent, ride danfos, earn and spend money, socialise, visit places like Shitta, and eat local food like amala. The game mixes Nigerian culture, humour, money, work, and social life. It passed 1 million players within four to five days of launch, with players from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, the UK, the US, and Togo. The game makes money through in-game advertising and optional purchases rather than charging players upfront. One controversy came up in October 2026: the Foundation for Investigative Journalism reported that the game was displaying adverts for an illegal website that pimped sex workers, on in-game billboards and on the surface of the virtual Lagos lagoon. The creators removed those ads within 24 hours of the report. Rayhamen has spoken about using AI agents to find bugs and rank feature requests, and she says she wants Lagos Life and future games to reach players outside Nigeria as well as at home.
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen Husband
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen is married. Her husband’s name has not been made public, and she keeps that part of her life private. In her Zikoko interview, she described how her husband reacted the morning after she built the game. He called her on the phone and asked what she had been doing. When she told him she had made a game, he was confused and asked, “You made a game?” He did not realise she had spent the night coding something that would change their lives. He had earlier encouraged her to focus on Eliy, her existing AI project, and he had agreed with her when she said her own projects were not doing well. He was supportive once he understood what had happened. Beyond that, no details about him or about children have been published. Rayhamen has said that software engineering has given her so much, but Lagos Life is what changed her life forever.
Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen Net Worth
There is no verified net worth figure for Ijeoma Shalom Rayhamen. As of her October 2026 interview, she said she had earned over 46,000 US dollars from Lagos Life revenue since launch, a figure she disclosed after someone on X offered 100,000 dollars to buy the game. She rejected that offer and said the game is worth much more. She has claimed a valuation of 1 billion US dollars for Lagos Life and projected 50 million dollars in revenue before December 2026, but those are her own claims, not confirmed market figures. What is confirmed is that her company Vatar raised 500,000 US dollars in angel funding on 9 October 2026 at a reported 10 million dollar valuation, about 665 million Naira. Before the game, she was a salaried software engineer. So the honest picture as of November 2026 is: over 46,000 dollars earned from the game so far, a 500,000 dollar investment secured, and a company she believes is on the path to becoming a billion-dollar business. Any website giving her a fixed net worth is guessing.