In a landmark initiative to advance Africa’s AI sovereignty and regional digital infrastructure, four technology leaders, Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (UAE), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a Joint Venture named AfricAI, focused on localizing, deploying, and commercializing enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored to African markets.
AfricAI will immediately focus on Nigeria as its flagship market, leveraging existing national data centres and edge infrastructure to deliver impactful AI applications in healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services. The Joint Venture aims to position Africa as an active developer of sovereign, inclusive, and context-aware AI ecosystems — built locally, for local needs.
“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,” said the founding partners.
AfricAI’s mission is not outsourcing AI to Africa; it’s developing it within Africa, by Africa, for Africa.
A Continental Vision
AfricAI envisions the development of a distributed, interoperable AI network across Africa. With localized applications in agriculture, urban planning, public services, and education, AfricAI seeks to empower African governments, enterprises, and communities with trusted, transparent AI infrastructure.
By 2026, the JV plans to expand into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda and train over 100 regional AI professionals while firmly establishing data, deployment, and decision-making on the continent.
Strategic Partnership Objectives
- Develop and deploy sovereign AI applications tailored to local market needs in areas such as digital identity, document automation, healthcare, education, and enterprise services.
- Integrate modular, agent-based AI architecture to enable adaptive and explainable AI across sectors like human resources, CRM, legal, and public policy.
- Leverage existing Nigerian edge and cloud infrastructure to ensure AI workloads are hosted, processed, and governed locally, in alignment with national data residency requirements.
- Establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to cultivate a regional talent pipeline in AI development, cybersecurity, model tuning, and ethical deployment.
- Enable AI lifecycle management, observability, and orchestration using infrastructure-level intelligence to ensure real-time compliance, system health, and scalable deployment.
- Strengthen regional digital sovereignty by embedding compliance frameworks, multilingual capabilities, and secure access controls into every layer of the AI deployment stack.
- Accelerate public-private partnerships through targeted pilot programs across key sectors such as government services, fintech, healthcare, utilities, and smart infrastructure.
- Expand into neighbouring African countries with interoperable platforms and open standards that support multilingual models, agentic workflows, and federated AI networks.
Use Cases Underway
AfricAI will prioritise the design and deployment of scalable AI solutions that address national development goals and market opportunities. Initial deployments include:
- Sovereign AI for Identity & Compliance: Localised AI models for digital onboarding, ID verification, and regulatory compliance, tailored to national documents and hosted on local infrastructure.
- Document Intelligence & Knowledge Automation: Semantic indexing and classification for government registries, legal systems, and enterprise workflows to enhance service delivery and transparency.
- Agentic AI Assistants: Modular AI agents that automate HR, education, policy planning, and innovation management, with explainability and interoperability built in.
- Multilingual Health & Citizen Services: AI-powered assistants trained in local languages (Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Pidgin) to improve access to healthcare, education, and support services.
- Secure Smart Document & Transaction Validation: Cyber-secured AI layers for fraud detection, document authentication, and secure digital transactions.
- AI Observability and Infrastructure Resilience: Infrastructure-aware AI for real-time monitoring, compliance, and orchestration across edge environments.
Partner Statements
Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, Chairman of Next Digital:
“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.”
Giuseppe Porcelli, CEO of Lakeba Group:
“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.”
Demetrio Russo, Founder and CEO of AqlanX:
“Localisation, 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.”
Eren Sivasli, Chairman of Agentic Dynamic
“We believe in scalable, domain-specific automation that truly supports human workflows. That’s why we’re excited to bring Agentic Dynamics’ segment-oriented agent architecture into this multinational collaboration.”
For media inquiries:
[email protected] www.africai.ai
About:
Next Digital is a forward-thinking African company dedicated to creating practical, locally-developed digital solutions for the continent’s most pressing challenges. From artificial intelligence to digital infrastructure, Next Digital operates at the intersection of technology, policy, and public good. Our mission is straightforward: to help African countries take charge of their digital futures by developing tools and systems that reflect local realities and priorities. Whether it’s improving healthcare access, making government services more efficient, or creating smarter tools for education and agriculture, Next Digital is committed to delivering solutions that work for Africa — not just in theory, but in practice.
Lakeba is a global venture studio headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with a proven track record of building, scaling, and commercializing technology ventures at the edge of innovation. Founded with the vision of turning ideas into sustainable businesses, Lakeba operates a unique end-to-end model that takes ventures from concept through to exit — with speed, strategy, and scale. Lakeba’s portfolio spans multiple sectors — from financial services and legal tech to AI automation, cyber intelligence, and real estate infrastructure. Notable ventures include DoxAI, a modular AI automation platform serving banks and governments; Quixxi, a pioneer in mobile app security; and Bricklet, a fractional property investment platform reshaping real estate access.
AqlanX Artificial Intelligence LLC is a UAE-based AI company pioneering Arabic-first enterprise automation across the Middle East. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, AqlanX is redefining how organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and drive digital transformation at scale. With a core focus on industries such as government, finance, healthcare, legal, and telecom, AqlanX delivers purpose-built AI solutions—from intelligent document processing and redaction to advanced identity verification, e-signature, and multilingual automation.
Agentic Dynamic a pioneering enterprise AI company operating across Europe and Turkey, announces the launch of its next-generation agentic workflow platform designed to redefine content and decision-based business functions. Built on a multi-agent architecture and an inferred Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) foundation, Agentic Dynamic automates document-heavy tasks across legal, academic, HR, CRM, and operational domains. Agentic Dynamic empowers organisations with a task-based AI platform that distributes knowledge-intensive processes—such as contract summarisation, project analysis, startup profiling, and career support—among specialised agents tailored to sector-specific needs. This business layer enables seamless deployment across departments, from HR and operations to client management and strategic planning.
