Since its incorporation in 2020, AyaHQ has taken on several identities. Founded by Eric Annan, Pishikeni Tukura, and Dennis Ukonu, it has been a stablecoin payments product, a remote-jobs marketplace, a training programme, a founder programme, and the operator of physical residencies in two countries. It has also been, by its co-founder Annan’s own admission, a company that many people struggle to place.
“A lot of people do not understand what we’re doing. In fact, we have people ask, ‘What exactly do you guys do? What exactly do you guys do?’ So, we are operating a black box which is not visible,” he told TechCabal.
In recent years, AyaHQ has helped African founders build companies, trained software engineers, product designers, and product managers, brought entrepreneurs together in physical residencies, and helped more than 80 startups take shape, according to the company.
However, in October 2026, AyaHQ closed its Kenyan residency in Kilifi. The 40-bed facility, designed to bring builders together, had run out of funding after nearly two years of operations.
“The model worked. We built real founder infrastructure, drew serious builders, and showed what is possible on very little,” Annan said.
Making the model work and finding the money to keep it running have proved to be two different challenges.
Day 1: A failed startup and the birth of AyaHQ
Before AyaHQ, Annan told TechCabal, he had tried to build a startup with a team spread across different parts of the continent. He believed he had assembled the right technical talent, vision, and skills needed to build a company, yet the team struggled to work together.
“I have previous experience of failing a startup that could have scaled, become a billion-dollar company, but it failed because there was zero empathy among the team,” he said.
Annan compared building a startup to conducting an orchestra, where different people have distinct responsibilities but must work together to produce something coherent. He believed his previous company had the right individual talents but lacked the cohesion needed to make them function as a team.
The question that stayed with him was whether it was possible to build a platform that helped founders find people who believed in their vision and were willing to build alongside them, whether or not the founder was technical. This became the starting point for AyaHQ.
AyaHQ was incorporated in October 2020, although Annan says the actual work of building the company began in 2021.
Its first product was Aya.cash, a stablecoin payment platform designed to help African remote workers receive and move money across borders. Launched in 2021, it emerged as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated remote work and opened up opportunities for African professionals to work with international companies. According to Annan, while the pandemic created new opportunities, getting paid for international jobs remained difficult, as existing payment systems were often slow and expensive.
Aya.cash was built to address that payment bottleneck using stablecoins for peer-to-peer transfers. As the company worked on the product, however, the team noticed that African professionals were struggling to gain visibility among international employers.
“Aya.cash showed us that a faster payment is worth nothing if the person never wins the work that triggers it,” he said. “The real problem was visibility and access: African talent was invisible to global employers.”
By May 2022, that realisation had pushed AyaHQ in a new direction.
Day 500: From helping job seekers to startup founders
Aya Gigs launched in May 2022, connecting African digital professionals across different disciplines with international employers hiring remotely. By August of that year, Annan noted that the initiative had connected more than 100 African professionals to international opportunities.
However, the success of Aya Gigs revealed yet another problem. Although the talent looked good on paper, some struggled to meet the expectations of working in global teams, and demand for placements began to fall. Annan pointed to differences in communication as one example. He recalled how a Ghanaian professional’s repeated use of “please” when speaking to American colleagues could leave them wondering why every request needed to be framed so politely.
“Employers judged how people communicated, collaborated, solved problems, and delivered inside distributed teams,” he said. “This is not a skills deficit in African talent. There is a gap between how talent is usually trained and what modern collaborative workplaces demand. Access gets people in the door. Capability keeps them there.”
In September 2022, AyaHQ retired Aya Gigs as its core business, as the company decided to focus on developing the skills and working habits that would help professionals thrive once they got international opportunities.
AyaHQ received a grant from Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange, which covered the funding for the pivot and AyaHQ’s first training programme. Annan explained that the he programme brought software developers, product designers and product managers into the same room to learn how to solve problems and build products together.
He explained that the result of the programme began to change how participants saw their prospects, as some had gone on to build products they wanted to take to market.
“I can build my own company,” he said, was the sentence that kept coming back from graduates of the programme. This would eventually push AyaHQ to shift its ambition from preparing African professionals for jobs to supporting early-stage founders as they built companies.
“We moved from preparing people for jobs to building the environments where founders are made,” Annan said.
Day 1000: The challenge of keeping founder infrastructure alive
AyaHQ introduced its founder programme in June 2023, focusing on helping startup founders identify problems, assemble teams, develop products, and build ventures that could reach the market.
“Founders need more than business training, mentors, and capital. They need the right environment, complementary capability, relationships, and real practice,” Annan said.
The programme is physical by design. In May 2023, AyaHQ opened its first builder residency in Accra, Ghana. The 32-bed facility brings founders together to live and work for periods of up to six weeks. The model expanded in January 2025, when AyaHQ opened a second residency in Kilifi, Kenya. Across the two locations, the company says it ran six formal residency cohorts with 250 founders across more than 80 startups.
AyaHQ also experimented with what Annan calls a pop-up city—a temporary gathering where builders from different locations live and work together, fostering collaboration beyond what a conventional online programme offers.
Across its programmes and physical spaces, AyaHQ says it has engaged more than 1,700 founders, builders, and ecosystem participants from over 20 countries. Through its partnership with Lisk, a blockchain company, AyaHQ also reports distributing more than $500,000 in grants to over 35 startups across more than 25 countries.
AyaHQ’s business model relies on institutions paying it to design and deliver founder programmes. The company also takes small equity stakes in some participating startups, allowing it to maintain an interest in their long-term development. However, following Lisk’s exit from the market in September, AyaHQ lost a major source of support and had to reconsider how to finance its operations. The financial pressure became acute in October 2026, when AyaHQ closed its Kilifi residency.
“We closed Kilifi in October 2026. Funding ran out, and we could not secure what it took to keep it running,” Annan said.
Annan does not describe the shutdown as a failure of the model. The problem, he says, was that nobody with a mandate to fund this work was funding it.
“A physical residency needs consistent backing, and we had almost none from institutions or government while working on youth employment, entrepreneurship, and innovation, the areas they are mandated to fund,” he said.
The Accra facility remains open, operating as a working hub rather than a fixed-cohort programme—hosting founder residencies, collaborative building, coworking, builder gatherings, mentorship, team retreats, and ecosystem engagements.
Annan sees three possible paths forward for AyaHQ: securing patient capital that can give the company a longer runway, operating as a philanthropic social enterprise, or deepening its work with what he calls the ministries of digital economies across the continent. He argues that African ecosystems cannot keep waiting for outside organisations to build what local founders and institutions should be investing in themselves.
“Everybody who has supported our vision, our mission is somebody who is not African,” he said. “We can’t continue to be begging our way out of poverty. We have to be intentional.”
Annan believes the continent needs many more institutions focused on developing early-stage founders and giving them the support to build.
He describes AyaHQ’s journey as a continuous line—beginning with helping African talent get paid, moving to providing access to jobs and developing workplace capabilities, and now helping those capabilities become companies.
“AyaHQ never changed its mission. Each product moved us closer to the real problem.”