01Adeshvir Dhanoa
AI Researcher
- AI Research Intern, U.S. DHS — secure data integrity
- Multi-source agent over 82M+ row data pipelines
- Agentic misinformation detector (STT + fact-checking)
Our people
Operators, scholars and engineers.
Kilwa is built by people who have underwritten the risk, published the research, and shipped the systems — and advised by a bench that spans sovereign partnerships, federal cyber, African energy and AI research.
Leadership
Who runs the firm.
Hinsley founded Kilwa on a straightforward observation from twenty years inside institutional finance: the capital that should be flowing into Africa is not held back by risk, but by the absence of usable intelligence about it.
He spent two decades underwriting credit, market and operational risk — thirteen years at Citi, most recently as Head of Enterprise Regulatory Engagement, and seven at Huntington Bank. He is a U.S. Air Force veteran of eight years, the author of five books on African history, power and the terms of the continent's development, and series editor across Kilwa's flagship research.
- 20 years in institutional risk and credit
- Citi · Huntington Bank
- U.S. Air Force veteran, 8 years
- Chicago Council on Global Affairs
- Series editor, Kilwa flagship research
Books
- Guardians of the ContinentThe Strategic Military Geniuses Who Shaped Africa's DestinyPaperback
- Poverty, Power and Africa's DestinyUnveiling the Underdevelopment Paradox — Twelve Reasons for Change, Reclaiming Virtù and Shaping Our FuturePaperback
- The Doctrine of DiscoveryHow Five Papal Bulls Redrew the World, and Why the Map Still HoldseBook
- The Rules of ConquestHow the Berlin Conference wrote the rules by which Africa was claimed, divided, and ruledeBook
- The World Is a Mask DancingHow Africa's Gods Survived Before and Beyond ChristianityeBook
Arham Anwaar
Lead Developer
Arham owns Kilwa's platform engineering — the model and data layers that turn a multilingual ingestion pipeline across all 54 African markets into the ISI and METI signals institutional users see, and the interfaces they see them through.
- Platform engineering
- Model & data infrastructure
Advisory council
The bench behind the platform.
Sovereign partnerships, federal cyber, African energy, capital markets technology, global cloud and AI research. The coalition is the moat, and it was convened rather than assembled.
AI & NLP
Kristian Hammond
Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science and Director of the MSAI programme, Northwestern University
Energy & Africa
Verner Ayukegba
SVP, African Energy Chamber · CEO, Melville Energy
Capital markets technology
Franklin Egbe
Head of Equities Trading Technologies, Credit Suisse Saudi Arabia
Federal & cyber
Brigadier General Terrence A. Adams
U.S. Air Force (Retired) · formerly Deputy Principal Cyber Advisor, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Cloud & financial services
Tabby Fusi
Enterprise Sales, Financial Services, Google Cloud
Program delivery & governance
Emmanuel Asongwe
Senior Technology Program Leader · PMP, ITIL
Research partnership
Northwestern University AI Lab
An Experiential Learning Agreement with Northwestern University, effective March 2026, under which the MSAI and Computer Science cohorts work with Kilwa.
Titles and affiliations are shown for identification only. They do not imply endorsement of Kilwa Technologies by any named institution, employer or government.
Northwestern engineering
The teams building the Kilwa Engine.
Kilwa's build teams come out of Northwestern — the MSAI programme under Professor Kristian Hammond's Project LEAD, and the CS 338 studio. These are engagements, not a hiring pipeline, though several have become both.
Kilwa × Northwestern MSAI
Summer 2026
The build team for the Kilwa Engine, drawn from Northwestern's MSAI programme under Professor Kristian Hammond's Project LEAD.
01
02Jatin Hooda
AI Research Engineer
- Enterprise-grade agentic AI
- Full-lifecycle machine learning infrastructure
- Production AI and petabyte-scale data engineering
03Jordan Johnson
Agentic AI Engineer
- Business Process Analyst, Worldpay (Tier-1 payments)
- Forecasting and performance analytics at scale
- FinTech AI: fraud prevention and predictive operations
04Naman Dua
Agentic AI Engineer
- Three years as a network and automation engineer, Hughes
- Agentic AI portfolio tracker (LLM + market data API)
- Real-time crypto trading bot, signal through to action
05Praneeth Mallupalli
ML Engineer — METI Forecasting
- Hybrid time-series forecasting under regime breaks
- Monte Carlo dispersion compressed into entry windows
- Ground-truth steward and peer validator on ISI
06Yitao "Eric" Hong
Applied AI Engineer
- RAG language model optimisation, Patsnap
- Fine-tuned LLMs for real-time multimodal AI
- BS Computer Science and Data Science, Worcester Polytechnic
Kilwa × Northwestern CS
CS 338, Winter 2026
The team behind Pulse, Kilwa's pipeline-health dashboard — the layer that tells us when a source has quietly stopped telling the truth.
What they built
- 01Built Pulse, the pipeline-health dashboard now used to watch Kilwa's ingestion layer
- 02Web-scraper monitoring and the Data Quality Score that flags a degrading source before it reaches a model
- 03Benchmarked FinBERT against VADER and TextBlob, including multilingual evaluation
The team
Aria Shi
Software Engineer
Northwestern, Class of 2027
Ishitta Groverr
Software Engineer
Northwestern, Class of 2028
Quan Zhou
Software Engineer
Northwestern, Class of 2026
Anna Zhao
Software Engineer
Northwestern, Class of 2028
“Illinois grows the AI talent the world needs. Kilwa exists to give that talent problems worth solving.”
Careers
We're hiring across nine roles.
Engineering, research, commercial and compliance — the roles most critical to the next eighteen months.
Get started
Talk to the people who built it.
Research questions go straight to the team that owns the methodology.