Eric Lunani builds Africa's technology and capital institutions from Nairobi, anchored by the Autonomous Advancement Initiative.
Eric Lunani
Eric Lunani is a 23-year-old technology entrepreneur and founder based in Nairobi, working across artificial intelligence, capital, and state capacity. He is the founder of the Autonomous Advancement Initiative (AAI), a proposed multilateral institution designed to accelerate AI adoption across Africa by giving governments, frontier labs, and investors a shared coordination layer. AAI is provisionally constituted as a youth-led cooperation framework, established in principle with Kenya's State Department for Foreign Affairs to serve as the institutional foundation for that work. He also leads EDU AI, building the data Africa needs to see the capability its people already have, and Nova Garage, the convening that puts builders, capital, and state in one room to back them.
Autonomous Advancement Initiative
- Chief Architect
- A 2025 cooperation framework with Kenya's State Department for Foreign Affairs, signed on the government's behalf by PS Dr. Korir Sing'oei, to build the legal and institutional groundwork for sovereign digital infrastructure
- Pairs the state's convening and diplomatic reach with young founders' technical capacity, opening routes to investment and institutional support
Nova Garage
- Co-founder
- A state-level convening co-created through the Autonomous Advancement Initiative, bringing builders, capital, and state into one room to back African founders with political weight
- Its launch drew coverage from The Standard in April 2026
On 11 May 2026, under the high patronage of H.E. President William Ruto, Nova Garage was pre-launched in Nairobi, co-convened with Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Autonomous Advancement Initiative framework and the French-African Foundation, and fully privately funded. It is a state-level forum that concentrates the forces that accelerate a continent. Builders, capital, and state, in one room where Africa's defining questions are put on the agenda and answered with political backing.
Its work is alignment. Capital on the continent's terms, doors opened for young people to build at home, and a template now being taken to foreign ministries across the regions.
Held annually, Nova Garage is built to become the most influential convening of its kind, an instrument of statecraft run by the generation it serves.
EDU AI Research
- Co-founder
- Piloting AI-driven assessment and feedback in Kenyan classrooms under a 2025 MOU with the State Department for Foreign Affairs, ahead of wider deployment
Development is constrained by a simple blindness. Africa does not know what its people can do. We count enrolment, we count exam grades, but a grade is a verdict, not knowledge. EDU AI exists to end that blindness.
Every examination sat across the continent is already a census of human capability, conducted at national scale, every single term. It is the richest development dataset Africa produces, and it is discarded the moment the marks are entered. EDU AI captures it. AI marking is how we get inside the exam, but what we build from it is a living map of capability, learner by learner, topic by topic, nation by nation.
With it, a school knows what to teach next, a country knows where its talent is forming, and a continent can finally direct its investment, its industry, and its institutions toward the capability it actually has rather than the capability it guesses at.
HURMAN Group
- Founder & Chairman
- Kenyan technology holding company and the base for Eric's research, advisory, and venture work; a long-term vehicle for building frontier companies from Nairobi
- Portfolio spans biometric identity, applied AI in education, and public-sector technology partnerships
- Within it, the Palm Identity Network is developing a contactless palm-vein recognition stack for authentication and payments, tuned for African identity contexts
Public engagements
- Nova Garage Summit 2026 — on the launch of the founder platform built through the Autonomous Advancement Initiative
- Africa-France Pre-Summit panel, 25th Kenya Model United Nations Annual Conference — Kenya School of Government, with Dr. Korir Sing'oei and H.E. Arnaud Suquet
Press
- Kenya banks on new innovation platform to enhance entrepreneurial skills — The Standard, on the Autonomous Advancement Initiative's co-creation of Nova Garage
Education
- Nova Pioneer
- BBA, University of London (distance)
Executive Education
- Leadership for Global Business and Politics — Yale School of Management