AfricAI launches to drive sovereign AI innovation across Africa

Four technology companies have formed a joint venture aimed at advancing sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities across Africa, starting with Nigeria and expanding to other nations on the continent.

The initiative, called AfricAI, brings together Lakeba Group from Australia, Next Digital from Nigeria, AqlanX from the United Arab Emirates, and Agentic Dynamic from the Netherlands. The joint venture is designed to localise, deploy, and commercialise enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored specifically to African markets.

AfricAI will initially focus on Nigeria as its core market, using existing national data centres and edge infrastructure to deliver AI applications in areas such as healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services. The vision is to develop artificial intelligence that is built and governed within Africa, reflecting local contexts and needs.

The founding partners stated, "We are bringing together four complementary pillars - global IP, regional expertise, deployment excellence, and next-gen agentic AI architecture - to create an AI foundation that reflects African realities."

AfricAI's declared mission is to ensure AI is not imported to Africa but developed within Africa, by Africans, for Africans.

Continental expansion

Beyond Nigeria, AfricAI plans to expand into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda by 2026, with an objective of training over 100 regional AI professionals. The venture also intends to establish firm data, infrastructure, and decision-making capabilities within Africa to strengthen digital sovereignty.

AfricAI's broader vision is to develop a distributed and interoperable AI network in Africa, supporting applications in agriculture, urban planning, public services, and education. The intention is to equip African governments, businesses, and communities with transparent and trustworthy AI infrastructure that meets local requirements.

Strategic objectives

The group has outlined several strategic objectives, including developing and deploying sovereign AI solutions, integrating modular agent-based architectures for explainable and adaptive AI, and leveraging existing Nigerian digital infrastructure to ensure compliance with data residency laws.

An additional objective is the establishment of a regional Centre of Excellence to develop local talent in AI, cybersecurity, model tuning, and ethical deployment practices. AfricAI will also focus on lifecycle management, observability, and orchestration to enable real-time compliance and scalable deployments. Compliance frameworks, secure access controls, and multilingual capabilities will be embedded across the architecture.

The partners also aim to accelerate public-private partnerships through pilot programmes spanning government, fintech, healthcare, utilities, and smart infrastructure sectors.

Planned use cases

Initial deployments lined up by AfricAI include AI models for digital identity verification and compliance, semantic indexing for government registries and legal systems, modular AI agents for HR and policy planning, and multilingual AI-powered assistants to improve access to healthcare and citizen services. AI solutions dedicated to cyber-secured transaction validation and infrastructure monitoring are also part of the initial programme.

Partner perspectives

"At Next Digital, we're not just deploying AI - we're shaping it to reflect who we are as Nigerians and Africans. AfricAI is about more than software. It's about exporting our intelligence, building our future on our terms, and making Africa a force in the global AI conversation. Nigeria will lead that movement - and we are ready."

This was the statement of Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, Chairman of Next Digital.

"Lakeba has long been at the forefront of global AI innovation. AfricAI marks a bold next step - not just for Lakeba, but for the future of sovereign AI. Nigeria offers the ideal launchpad for building a truly African AI ecosystem. With our flagship DoxAI platform and deep capabilities in cybersecurity, automation, and orchestration, we are proud to architect the AI infrastructure Africa needs and deserves."

Giuseppe Porcelli, Chief Executive Officer of Lakeba Group, commented on his company's commitment to the project.

"Localization, multilingual compliance, and digital trust are core to our AI philosophy. AfricAI reflects a strategic intent by AqlanX to help shape Africa's digital sovereignty agenda while enabling secure, AI-first innovation ecosystems built for scale, ethics, and inclusion."

This view was shared by Demetrio Russo, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AqlanX.

"We believe in scalable, domain-specific automation that truly supports human workflows. That's why we're excited to bring Agentic Dynamic's segment-oriented agent architecture into this multinational collaboration."

Eren Sivasli, Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, discussed the value of their technology in the new joint venture.

AfricAI's partners are jointly seeking to embed secure, adaptive, and locally relevant AI infrastructure across Africa's public and private sectors as part of a long-term strategy to build regional digital capacity and sovereignty.