Four global technology firms, Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (UAE), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands), have announced the formation of a new joint venture, AfricAI, aimed at developing sovereign artificial intelligence solutions tailored for the African market. The initiative, launched in Nigeria on August 18, 2025, marks a significant step toward strengthening the continent’s digital sovereignty and ensuring AI systems are built locally, tailored to local realities, and governed by African institutions.
Nigeria has been chosen as the flagship market for AfricAI’s rollout. The country’s existing cloud and edge infrastructure will serve as the foundation for enterprise-grade AI applications in critical areas, including healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services. The partners emphasized that this venture is not about outsourcing AI development to Africa, but rather building it within Africa, by Africans, and for Africa.
At its core, AfricAI brings together four complementary capabilities: Lakeba Group’s global intellectual property and AI platforms, Next Digital’s regional expertise and market access, AqlanX’s specialization in localization and compliance, and Agentic Dynamic’s advanced agent-based AI architecture. Together, these pillars are expected to deliver scalable, adaptive, and context-aware solutions that reflect African languages, cultures, and regulatory environments.
Speaking on the launch, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, Chairman of Next Digital, said the venture represents more than just a software project, but a commitment to shaping AI in ways that reflect African identity and aspirations. “Nigeria will lead this movement,” he noted, stressing the importance of building AI solutions that export African intelligence and innovation to the world. Giuseppe Porcelli, CEO of Lakeba Group, added that Nigeria offers the ideal launchpad for developing a truly sovereign AI ecosystem, while Demetrio Russo of AqlanX highlighted multilingual compliance and digital trust as essential to AfricAI’s mission. Eren Sivasli, Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, described the venture as an opportunity to bring domain-specific, human-centered automation to African institutions.
Looking ahead, AfricAI envisions building a distributed and interoperable AI network across the continent. Beyond Nigeria, the joint venture plans to expand into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda by 2026. The roadmap also includes training at least 100 regional AI professionals and establishing a Center of Excellence to develop skills in model training, cybersecurity, and ethical AI deployment. This will ensure that the knowledge base and governance structures for AI remain firmly rooted within Africa.
AfricAI’s immediate use cases include sovereign AI for identity verification and compliance, document intelligence for government and enterprise workflows, modular AI assistants for education and public administration, multilingual health and citizen services, and cyber-secured transaction validation. These solutions will be hosted on local infrastructure to comply with national data residency rules, reinforcing the broader goal of digital sovereignty.
The launch of AfricAI aligns with Africa’s growing push for data and AI sovereignty. Recent policy discussions, including those at the Pan-African Parliament, have underscored the urgency of establishing frameworks that ensure Africa develops its own trusted digital infrastructure rather than relying on external providers. AfricAI, by combining global expertise with local ownership, positions itself at the heart of this movement.
Ultimately, AfricAI is more than a commercial venture; it is a strategic effort to ensure that Africa becomes an active participant in shaping the global AI economy. By embedding compliance, transparency, and local context into every layer of its systems, the joint venture seeks to redefine how AI is developed and deployed on the continent, making Africa not just a consumer of AI technologies but a leading contributor to their evolution.
