AyaHQ has closed its 40-bed founder residency in Kilifi, Kenya, after the facility ran out of funding in October 2026, according to the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Eric Annan.
Annan described the closure in a column published by TechCabal on 14 November. “We closed Kilifi in October 2026. Funding ran out, and we could not secure what it took to keep it running,” he said.
According to the column, AyaHQ opened the Kilifi residency in January 2025 as its second physical residency. Its 32-bed residency in Accra, Ghana, opened in May 2023 and remains open. The Accra site now operates as a working hub for founder residencies, coworking, mentorship and builder gatherings rather than fixed cohorts.
The company has changed form several times since it was incorporated in 2020. TechCabal’s column describes a stablecoin payments product, a remote-jobs marketplace, a training programme and then a founder programme. Its founder programme launched in June 2023.
The business model depended on institutions paying AyaHQ to design and deliver founder programmes, plus small equity stakes in some participating startups, the column says. Annan told TechCabal that the funding for physical residencies had not come from institutions or governments. “A physical residency needs consistent backing, and we had almost none from institutions or government,” he said.
He also said the model had worked. “The model worked. We built real founder infrastructure, drew serious builders, and showed what is possible on very little,” he said. He named three possible paths for the company: patient capital, a philanthropic social-enterprise model, or deeper work with ministries of digital economy across the continent.
The company says that across its two residencies it ran six formal cohorts with 250 founders across more than 80 startups, and that it has engaged more than 1,700 founders, builders and ecosystem participants from more than 20 countries. StartupNews has not verified these figures.
AyaHQ’s funding history is also relevant. In August 2025, TechCabal reported that the company had disclosed about $1 million in total funding, including equity and grants, and was in talks to raise $10 million, including a $5 million microfund. The 2025 report did not say the larger raise had closed, and we found no published report that it has.
What we could not confirm
The closure is dated only to October 2026. We found no closure notice on AyaHQ’s homepage or in the other sources we checked, so the account rests on Annan’s on-record statements to TechCabal.
TechCabal’s column also links the funding squeeze to the exit of Lisk, the blockchain company that had partnered with AyaHQ on incubation. Lisk’s own November 2026 notice says the Lisk Chain shut down on 2 November and that Lisk continues as a finance platform for businesses. This article does not rely on the column’s account of a September market exit.
Annan’s own explanation points to a wider gap. “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.”
Sources
- How AyaHQ turned a failed startup into a founder-building business (TechCabal column by Opeyemi Kareem, 14 November 2026)
- The Lisk Chain has closed. The new Lisk is just getting started. (Lisk, November 2026)
- AyaHQ is raising $10 million to build a Web3 talent ecosystem (TechCabal, 27 August 2025)
- AyaHQ website
