In a bid to advance Africa’s AI sovereignty and regional digital infrastructure, with a focused on localising, deploying, and commercialising enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored to African markets, 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.
AfricAI will immediately focus on Nigeria as its flagship market, leveraging existing national data centers 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.
According to the founding partners, they 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 envisions the development of a distributed, interoperable AI network across Africa. With localised 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.
The initiative aims to 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.
It will also Leverage existing Nigerian edge and cloud infrastructure to ensure AI workloads are hosted, processed, and governed locally, in alignment with national data residency requirements, as well as Establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) to cultivate a regional talent pipeline in AI development, cybersecurity, model tuning, and ethical deployment.
Chairman, Next Digital, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, said, “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.”
The JV would enable AI lifecycle management, observability, and orchestration using infrastructure-level intelligence to ensure real-time compliance, system health, and scalable deployment. It will strengthen regional digital sovereignty by embedding compliance frameworks, multilingual capabilities, and secure access controls into every layer of the AI deployment stack.
It would also accelerate public-private partnerships through targeted pilot programs across key sectors such as government services, fintech, healthcare, utilities, and smart infrastructure and expand into neighboring African countries with interoperable platforms and open standards that support multilingual models, agentic workflows, and federated AI networks.
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, document Intelligence & Knowledge Automation, agentic AI Assistants, multilingual Health & Citizen Services, secure Smart Document & Transaction Validation and AI Observability and Infrastructure Resilience.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Lakeba Group, Giuseppe Porcelli, said, “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.”
Founder, AqlanX, Demetrio Russo, said, “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.”
Chairman, Agentic Dynamic, Eren Sivasli, said “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.”
