15 People to Meet at AI Everything Kenya 2026

AI Everything Kenya × GITEX Kenya lands in Nairobi on May 19-21, 2026. 15,000+ attendees. 500+ exhibitors. 75+ countries. Three days that will compress a year of African tech conversations into one venue.

You cannot meet everyone. You should not try. The highest-leverage thing you can do before the event is decide who specifically you want to meet, and why.

This is a curated list of 15 confirmed speakers across five categories — African VCs, fintech operators, Kenyan policy and tech leaders, global AI voices, and emerging African AI founders. For each one, I have tried to explain why they matter and who specifically should prioritize meeting them.

Disclosure upfront: This post is published by Cardtag, an independent Kenyan networking platform. We are not affiliated with AI Everything Kenya or GITEX in any way. Speaker list drawn from the publicly announced program at aieverythingkenya.com. All facts about each speaker are drawn from public sources — their companies, interviews, and press coverage. If we have anything wrong, email hello@cardtag.io and we will fix it.

The African VCs

If you are a founder, these are the people who could write your next check. The investor landscape in Africa is tighter than it was two years ago, which means the people still actively deploying capital are the ones to find.

1. Andreata Muforo — Partner, TLcom Capital (Kenya)

TLcom is one of the most active Africa-focused venture funds. They have backed Andela, Twiga Foods, Ilara Health, and a long list of other African companies. Andreata has been a partner there for years and sits across multiple portfolio boards. If you are a seed-to-Series A founder building for African markets, TLcom is a fund you want in your deck.

Prioritize if you are: a founder raising seed or Series A with traction in African markets, particularly in fintech, health, agritech, or SaaS.

2. Zachariah George — Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Launch Africa Ventures (South Africa)

Launch Africa is one of the most active early-stage VC funds on the continent. Zach is known for being prolific — the fund has invested in well over 100 startups across Africa. If you are pre-seed or seed and you need an early believer to anchor your round, Launch Africa is on the shortlist.

Prioritize if you are: a pre-seed or seed founder who needs a first institutional check.

3. Sapna Shah — Partner, Novastar Ventures (Kenya)

Novastar is a growth-stage fund with a strong focus on African companies tackling big consumer and commercial markets. They back businesses that can scale across the continent. They were early believers in companies like Moniepoint, which gives you a sense of their conviction stage.

Prioritize if you are: a Series A-B founder with meaningful revenue and looking for growth capital from a fund that understands African scaling.

4. Karima El Hakim — Partner, Africa, Plug and Play Tech Center (Egypt)

Plug and Play is a global VC and accelerator network, and Karima runs their Africa efforts. The firm has historically been one of the most active early-stage investors in tech globally — they were early in PayPal, Dropbox, and many other famous names. Their Africa arm is newer but rapidly scaling.

Prioritize if you are: a founder who wants exposure to a global network with strong US and MENA connections in addition to Africa-specific capital.

5. Ryosuke Yamawaki — General Partner, Verod Kepple Africa Ventures (Kenya)

Verod Kepple is a fund that bridges African and Japanese capital — a rare combination that can be useful for founders looking for unconventional LP networks. Ryosuke brings a global perspective to the African VC conversation that most other funds do not offer.

Prioritize if you are: a founder interested in Japanese or broader Asian strategic partnerships, or building something with cross-border ambitions.

The African fintech operators

These are the founders who have actually built and scaled the fintech companies everyone else talks about. If you are building in fintech, adjacent to fintech, or selling into fintech, meeting them is worth the three-day ticket by itself.

6. Tosin Eniolorunda — Co-Founder & Group CEO, Moniepoint (Nigeria)

Moniepoint is one of Africa's biggest fintech success stories. The company processes over $22 billion in transactions monthly, achieved unicorn valuation in 2024 after raising $110 million led by Google and DPI, and has expanded into Kenya and the UK. Tosin started as a software engineer at Interswitch, co-founded TeamApt in 2015, and bootstrapped the company for years before institutional funding. Few African fintech founders have built at this scale, and fewer still while remaining profitable.

Prioritize if you are: a fintech founder who wants to learn how to build a profitable, cross-border payments business. Or a payments partner looking for African distribution. Or anyone curious about what "actually building at scale" looks like in African fintech.

7. Dotun Daniel Adekunle — COO & CTO, OPay (Nigeria)

OPay is one of Moniepoint's main competitors in Nigeria — a super-app covering payments, banking, and commerce. Dotun sits at the intersection of technology and operations for one of the most-used fintech apps in West Africa.

Prioritize if you are: building payments infrastructure, exploring super-app models, or interested in how large consumer fintechs operationalize at scale.

8. Mayur Patel — President & MD, FinTech, M-KOPA (Kenya)

M-KOPA is one of Kenya's most recognized tech companies — they pioneered pay-as-you-go solar financing and have since expanded into smartphone financing, loans, and digital services. Mayur runs their fintech arm, which is one of the fastest-growing parts of the business.

Prioritize if you are: interested in consumer lending, device financing, or the asset-light financial services models that work in African markets.

9. Lasbery Chioma Oludimu — Managing Director, Yellowcard (Nigeria)

Yellowcard is one of Africa's largest crypto-to-fiat platforms, operating across 20+ African countries. The company sits at a controversial intersection — crypto and African regulation — and has navigated it to become a meaningful player in cross-border payments. Lasbery runs the business.

Prioritize if you are: interested in crypto, stablecoins, cross-border remittances, or the emerging regulatory conversation around digital assets in Africa.

The Kenyan policy and tech heavy hitters

These are the people whose decisions and perspectives shape how Kenya's tech ecosystem develops. If you are building in Kenya or planning to enter the market, meeting them is strategic.

10. Prof. Bitange Ndemo — Former ICT Permanent Secretary and current Vice Chancellor designate, University of Nairobi

Bitange Ndemo is, without exaggeration, one of the architects of modern Kenyan tech. As Permanent Secretary of Kenya's Ministry of Information and Communication from 2005 to 2013, he spearheaded the TEAMS undersea fiber cable (which made Kenyan internet affordable), the Kenya Open Data Initiative, and the regulatory environment that made M-PESA possible. He went on to become Kenya's Ambassador to Belgium and the EU, chaired the Kenya Distributed Ledgers and AI Taskforce, and has been recently appointed Vice Chancellor of the University of Nairobi. If you want to understand how Kenyan tech policy actually gets made, he is the person who made a lot of it.

Prioritize if you are: a founder navigating Kenyan regulation, an investor trying to understand the policy landscape, or anyone building in AI where the Kenyan government's stance matters.

11. Kate Kallot — Founder & CEO, Amini (Kenya)

Kate is one of the most prominent African AI founders globally. Born in France to parents from the Central African Republic, she spent her early career at Arm, Intel, and Nvidia — where she led emerging markets ecosystem work. In 2022 she founded Amini, a Nairobi-based AI company that uses satellite data and AI to build environmental data infrastructure for Africa. The company works with Aon, the African Development Bank, and global food companies, and was reported to have grown revenue 500% in 2025. She was named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI. Her thesis — that the AI revolution for Africa has to be built in Africa, not adapted from Silicon Valley — is shaping how a generation of African AI founders think.

Prioritize if you are: an AI founder, a climate tech investor, an agritech operator, or anyone interested in the practical question of how AI infrastructure gets built for the Global South.

12. Caleb Maru — Founder & CEO, Tech Safari (Kenya)

Tech Safari is the newsletter that has quietly become one of the most-read sources of African tech news for the diaspora and Africa-focused investors. Caleb has built a distribution asset that reaches tens of thousands of people who care about African tech — investors, founders, operators, policymakers. If you want your company to get noticed in the right circles, Caleb's audience matters.

Prioritize if you are: a founder looking to increase visibility in the African tech conversation, or a marketing person trying to understand how African tech media actually works.

The global AI voices

These are the international figures whose perspectives on African AI will shape how the continent is treated on the global stage. A brief conversation with any of them can change how you think about what you are building.

13. Abeba Birhane — Global AI Advocate & Cognitive Scientist (Ireland)

Abeba is one of the most respected critical voices in the global AI conversation. An Ethiopian-Irish cognitive scientist, she has built an international reputation for rigorous analysis of AI datasets, bias, and the gap between AI hype and AI reality. She is known for being willing to say unpopular truths to powerful AI labs. In a conference full of optimistic pitches, she is the person who will push you to think harder about what you are actually building.

Prioritize if you are: an AI founder who wants honest feedback, a researcher interested in AI ethics and dataset scrutiny, or anyone who wants to avoid building something that will embarrass them in 3 years.

14. Emmanuel Lubanzadio — Head for Africa, OpenAI (Spain)

OpenAI is the single most influential AI company in the world right now, and Emmanuel runs their Africa operations. Any founder building on top of OpenAI's APIs, any enterprise deploying ChatGPT at scale, any government negotiating AI policy — this is the person connecting those conversations to the world's most important AI lab.

Prioritize if you are: a founder building on OpenAI's models, an enterprise buyer evaluating AI partners, or anyone interested in how global AI labs are approaching the African market.

15. Alessandro Curioni — Vice President Europe and Africa, IBM (Switzerland)

IBM has one of the longest-running AI research efforts in the world — Watson, predecessors, and current foundation model work. Alessandro runs IBM's work across Europe and Africa, which puts him at the intersection of enterprise AI deployment and African market strategy. He represents a different flavor of AI conversation — enterprise, long-term, infrastructure-heavy.

Prioritize if you are: an enterprise buyer, a government CIO, or a founder selling into large corporate AI budgets.

How to actually approach these people

A list like this is only useful if you know what to do with it. Here is what works.

Before the event: research each person you want to meet. Not just their title — what they have said publicly, what their company has done recently, what they seem to care about. Come with one specific, thoughtful question or observation. "What do you think about AI?" is a waste of everyone's time. "I saw your recent comment about data sovereignty in the Global South — I am building something adjacent and would love 30 seconds of your reaction" is the kind of opening that can actually start a conversation.

At the event: these people are in demand. They have limited time. Respect it. Do not corner them for 20 minutes. Introduce yourself crisply (who you are, what you do, why you care about meeting them), ask your one specific question, and then either let the conversation develop naturally or say thank you and move on. The shorter you make the ask, the more likely it is to turn into something.

After the event: follow up within 24 hours. Reference something specific from your conversation. Suggest a concrete next step — a 15-min call, an introduction, a shared document, whatever makes sense. Do not send a blank "great meeting you" message. That is the equivalent of a business card in the trash.

If you are looking for a tool that captures the context of every conversation and generates personalized follow-ups automatically — that is what we built Cardtag for. At AI Everything Kenya × GITEX Kenya, we are hosting a free independent networking arena for attendees. You can take the 2-minute networking assessment at cardtag.io/score to get an invite when the arena goes live closer to the event.

The honest note

Fifteen is a small number. There are dozens of other brilliant people confirmed for this event — Natalie Jabangwe from the UNDP Timbuktoo fund, Adil El Youssefi running Africa Data Centres at Cassava, Tamim El Zein at Seedstars Africa, Thule Lenneiye at AGRA, and many others across governments, corporates, and startups. The full speaker list at aieverythingkenya.com is worth reviewing carefully.

This list is a starting point, not the full picture. Pick the people most relevant to what you are trying to accomplish. Do the research. Show up prepared. And remember that the goal of meeting any of these people is not to collect another business card — it is to start a relationship that matters 6 months, 2 years, 10 years from now.

See you at KICC.

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*Cardtag is an independent Kenyan networking platform. We are not affiliated with AI Everything Kenya, GITEX Kenya, or any of the speakers mentioned. All speaker information is drawn from publicly available sources and is accurate as of publication. If any speaker finds inaccuracies in how we have described their work, email connect@cardtag.io and we will correct it immediately.*

cardtag.io/score — Know your networking type before you walk into KICC.