The former chief executive officer (CEO) of Kenyan cloud startup Angani, Phares Kariuki, has co-founded another Kenyan cloud and infrastructure company, named Node Africa.
Kariuki departed Angani last year, with the startup subsequently suffering a period of prolonged downtime that resulted in threats of legal action by disgruntled customers.
Now, alongside co-founder Brian Muita, former Angani chief technology officer (CTO), he has returned to the sector with the launch of the self-funded Node Africa, offering bespoke cloud infrastructure to individual enterprises as appropriate for their business.
Node Africa describes itself as the “perfect partner” with which to bring cloud computing to Kenya. The startup said its approach is not about public, private or hybrid clouds, but rather deploying cloud solutions relevant to an enterprise’s needs, regardless of provider.
“Our team has years of experience running critical systems in Kenya and Africa as a whole. We know what it means to design highly available systems with nominal or no downtime. Our expertise also lies in building highly secure systems to safeguard from any types of breeches, both within and without the organisation,” Kariuki said.
The Node Africa approach includes consulting, design, build, and deployment of cloud-based solutions.
“We help organisations recoup their costs on their IT infrastructure, and increase agility whilst mitigating the risk that comes with IT infrastructure,” said Kariuki.
“Our team has industry leading expertise when it comes to helping customers execute on their vision. We will maintain, monitor and run your infrastructure with nominal input from your team, allowing your business to focus on what it wants from IT and data.”
He said at the core of Node Africa was information management, but the startup would also leverage its cloud infrastructure to help companies with their data requirements. Node Africa plans to build its user base in Kenya originally, before expanding across the continent.
