Israel Dare

A Story of Israel O. Dare

Israel O. Dare watched television for the first time at twelve. He got his first phone at sixteen — stolen within weeks. His parents replaced it two years later; that one vanished too. He did not properly own a phone until twenty-one, a gift from his uncle. In his neighborhood in Akure, Nigeria, owning a laptop didn't signal ambition — it made you a suspect. For most of his engineering degree, he had none. He borrowed machines, queued for lab computers, and learned to plan every line of work in his head before ever sitting down to type. That discipline — think completely, then execute with precision — never left him.

Somewhere inside that scarcity, he found the violin, then viola, cello, and piano. No tutor, no lessons, just repetition and stubbornness. He later taught those instruments himself, from 2019 to 2023, at Salem School of Music in Akure — handing children access to something he'd once had to fight alone to reach.

At the Federal University of Technology, Akure, he studied Agricultural Engineering and refused to be ordinary. He was named Overall Best Student for 2018/2019 and graduated First Class Honours — top three percent of his class — without a personal laptop or a reliable phone for most of it. Alongside his studies, he coordinated the Apostolic Faith Campus Fellowship from 2019 to 2021, leading hundreds of students through the disorientation of COVID-19, and served as the fellowship's Music Leader, training members who had never touched an instrument before.

Then, in April 2023, a fatal car accident took his father's life and hospitalized his mother. Overnight, Israel stopped preparing for adulthood and became the anchor his family depended on. Grief could not be private; it had to become fuel. He turned to artificial intelligence and automation — not as a trend, but as survival.

What followed was rapid and deliberate. He founded IzzyTechub in January 2024, building it into a practice serving clients across four continents. He became Top Rated Plus on Upwork, top three percent worldwide with a 100% five-star rating on every project. He earned six certifications from Anthropic in Claude AI, an AI Red Teaming certification from Microsoft, and an AI Security & Governance certification from Securiti.ai.

The results followed the discipline: an AI sales system he built for a solar company in Puerto Rico generated over $300,000 in closed sales in 60 days. A multi-channel AI booking system booked over 900 appointments in four months, beating an all-human team by fifty percent. An automated content engine grew a client's following by 500,000 in 30 days. RAG-powered AI agents he deployed for two educational institutions cut support workload by 68 percent. He now also works as an Intern AI Engineer at Edutech Global, building RAG agents and conversational AI systems.

He did not wait until he'd "made it" to give back. In March 2024, he co-founded Apexium, training underserved young Nigerians in AI, automation, and digital literacy free of charge, delivered in person, with laptops provided to students who had none. In under two years, Apexium has trained over 400 students. Israel now leads a team of more than thirty people, and more than ten Apexium alumni have gone on to build significant wealth of their own, a proof that talent is universal even where opportunity isn't.

Distrustful of mainstream media and manipulated feeds, he stepped away from social media almost entirely and built Oracle, a personal intelligence system that surfaces high-signal opportunities — scholarships, grants, rare jobs — without the noise. If a system wasn't built to serve him, he built his own.

Today Israel carries many roles at once — engineer, AI architect, founder, teacher, mentor, musician, caregiver, and, in his own words, a creative rebel.

He continues to support his family as their anchor. He is now pursuing graduate study abroad not for permission to be excellent, but for access to rooms never built with someone like him in mind.

His long-term vision reaches past his own success: AI-powered systems that reduce Africa's post-harvest food losses and connect smallholder farmers to the global economy they've long been locked out of.

Israel doesn't tell his story as one of hardship overcome for its own sake. He tells it as proof of a principle he has staked his life on: resourcefulness can outpace privilege. He is only getting started.