Build Log Finale: We Built a Flying Plane.
December 6, 2025
If 2025 were a movie, it would be the Pirates of the Caribbean. We set our venture studio model sailing for the first time. All year, we have been in ship mode, constantly moving, adjusting to the waves, fixing things mid-sail, and refusing to dock. With roughly a week left in the year, here is a look at how the ship sailed:
To help Ghanaian teachers reduce the burden of lesson planning and managing large class sizes, and to help learners improve learning outcomes, a pod from the Venture Studio partnered with our AI Lab to ship Jesi AI.
The product was accepted into the Mastercard EdTech Fellowship and successfully graduated from the program, reaching 9,950 users as of now.
We shipped our second baby, NouriTrack an AI-powered tool helping frontline health workers detect child malnutrition early.
Nouritrack went through the UNICEF Startup Lab, and following the program, was accepted into the UNICEF Scale-Up Fund. This, too, was built in collaboration with the 8 AI Lab.
Fafa, a safe space for young people to seek and receive mental health support, evolved from an experiment into a beta product. There is a longer story about how it moved from idea to launch. We will share that later.
Akpe, our very first project after pivoting fully into the Venture Studio model, took a big baby step this year. Its mission is to introduce trust into fundraising and make it easier to give, receive, and show appreciation. We shipped the beta to test real user behavior and experience. I still check the admin dashboard almost every night before bed, just to watch the transaction volume climb.
Looking back, we did not just ship products.
Before anything else, we focused on solving wicked problems, the kind that affect us deeply as humans. That is the core of the Venture Studio: creating human-centric solutions to real, pressing problems.
Like Pirates of the Caribbean, the ship stays afloat, and it only stops when humans are faced with no more problems to solve.
