Henon EdTech is an education technology company I co-founded — now Ethiopia’s integrated education technology platform. We started from a picture that bothered us: teachers spending more time on paper records than on teaching, principals buried in ledger books with no real view of their own school, and parents completely in the dark — no notice when a child didn’t show up, no way to check fees, no connection to the classroom.

Our answer was to give every school a complete digital operating system — fee collection, academics, attendance, parent communication, and student records in one place, built for Ethiopian schools. After three years of building quietly, we announced the company publicly in August 2026.

Scale

• —1000+ schools onboarded across Ethiopia
• —416,000+ students on the platform
• —392,000+ parents connected to their children’s education
• —3 bank partners — CBE, Wegagen Bank, and Lion Bank
• —ETB 8 billion+ in school fee transactions processed through the platform

I wear many hats at Henon: I build the games and the LMS backend, represent the company to international partners, drive our AI direction, and grow the engineering team.

Engineering

2D Games for Adaptive Learning

I design and build the web-based 2D vector games at the heart of Henon’s gamified learning experience. Instead of static lessons, students learn by playing — and the games respond to how each student performs:

• —Interactive 2D games built for the browser, covering curriculum content as play
• —Game mechanics wired into the adaptive engine, so difficulty and content adjust to each student’s level in real time
• —Assessments embedded inside gameplay, turning practice and testing into something students actually want to do
• —Lightweight vector rendering so games run smoothly on the low-end devices common in classrooms

LMS Backend — Built Solo

I architected and developed the entire backend of the learning management system on my own — the platform behind online classes, assignments, quizzes, and multimedia lessons:

• —Full API powering courses, lessons, assignments, quizzes, and student progress tracking
• —The data layer that feeds the adaptive system: capturing student performance and serving personalized content back
• —Multi-role access for students, teachers, and administrators
• —Designed to hold up at scale — the platform serves tens of thousands of students at 99.9% uptime

International Partnerships

I’m the face of Henon in its collaborations with international companies — leading the outreach, video-conference negotiations, and integration work that bring world-class content to Ethiopian classrooms:

• —Britannica — negotiated with their team to bring Britannica’s encyclopedic content into Henon’s platform
• —PhET Simulations (University of Colorado Boulder) — partnered to integrate their interactive science and math simulations, so students in grades 6–12 learn by experimenting rather than memorizing
• —Lesan AI — collaborating to use their Ethiopian-tailored AI models, giving our students an AI that actually understands Ethiopia’s local languages
• —hihilulu — partnering to bring their Chinese-learning platform to Henon, ahead of Ethiopia’s move to roll out Chinese language education nationwide

AI Direction

• —Designed the AI-powered adaptive learning system that personalizes content per student
• —Push the whole team to embrace AI in their daily workflow
• —Research and evaluate AI model pricing to keep our costs sustainable at scale

Leadership & Team Building

• —Scout talented students from universities, bring them in as interns, and supervise them until they grow into full Henon engineers — a pipeline that has sharpened my leadership as much as their skills
• —Known internally as the person who finds creative, low-cost engineering paths to capabilities that would normally demand serious funding

Operations

• —Manage the company’s online payments, including our AI service subscriptions
• —Supervise the release pipeline for the Henon mobile app on Google Play

Phoenix Games is a virtual and betting games company. I build the admin control systems and interfaces behind its gaming products, and have shipped several of its flagship platforms and landing experiences.

Admin Control Systems

I built the admin control systems — both backend and frontend — that operate Phoenix’s virtual betting games:

• —Full control-plane backend paired with clean React admin dashboards
• —NATS for service provisioning across the platform
• —A custom Identity Provider built on Better Auth, later migrated to Zitadel for enterprise-grade identity and access management

Phoenix Studio — AI Game Builder

Phoenix Studio is an AI that builds games from natural-language prompts, with full editing capabilities on top of what it generates. I built its landing page.

PhoenixVerse

PhoenixVerse is Phoenix’s unified platform — combining its games, gamification, a prediction market, and a wallet system into one connected experience. I contributed to building it out.

Falcon’s Eye — Regulatory Command Center

I built the immersive landing experience for Falcon’s Eye, a proposed centralized control system for gaming regulators: every wager, deposit, and payout from every licensed operator, streamed into a single command center — to watch, verify, and enforce in real time.

EthioLottery

I contributed to EthioLottery, Ethiopia’s national lottery and betting system.

Building the Team

I also helped Phoenix find and recruit engineering and design talent. To run that process, I built a dedicated contests platform for sourcing and evaluating candidates.

As a volunteer, I built a form builder system for Ayder Comprehensive Specialized (Referral) Hospital in Tigray, Ethiopia — one of the largest referral hospitals in the country — to digitize how it collects pregnancy (antenatal care) and patient checkup data. The work was part of the broader VODAN-Africa health-data effort, and it landed in a region rebuilding its health services after years of conflict.

What It Did

• —A form builder that let hospital staff create and customize their own data-collection forms — new forms and fields without needing a developer each time
• —Digitized antenatal-care and routine checkup records that had been captured on paper, turning them into structured, consistent data
• —Standardized how maternal-health data was recorded across the hospital, so records were complete, comparable, and reusable — not scattered across paper sheets

Why It Mattered

A referral hospital like Ayder serves a large population across northern Ethiopia, and reliable maternal-health data is exactly what it needs to track patient care and plan services — especially in a region recovering from conflict. Building it as a volunteer meant the hospital got a tool it could keep using and adapt on its own, at no cost.

The Addis Ababa Education and Training Quality Regulatory Authority (AAETQRA) is the government body responsible for ensuring the quality of education and training across Addis Ababa. I build and maintain IEARMS, the authority’s platform for teacher assessment and secure examinations — a system that has to stay fair, tamper-proof, and reliable at national scale.

Secure Exam Engine

I designed and built the exam preparation engine and online exam room from the ground up, with integrity as the first requirement:

• —A strong anti-cheat system that protects the exam room against tampering and misconduct
• —Live proctoring mode, giving supervisors real-time visibility into active exams
• —The ability to block an exam-taker or teacher on the spot when a violation is detected
• —A carefully considered UX/UI so test-takers — many under exam stress — can focus on the exam, not the interface

Performance at Scale

A public exam system fails if it can’t hold up on exam day, so I hardened it against real load:

• —Automated stress testing simulating thousands of simultaneous test-takers
• —Tuned the platform to handle 5,000+ concurrent users at once without degradation
• —Engineered front-end strategies to cut request volume, meaningfully reducing server traffic and load rather than just scaling hardware

Teacher Assessment

I built the teacher assessment feature that lets the authority evaluate and track educator performance as part of its quality-regulation mandate.

Developer Tooling

To speed the team up and shorten time-to-production, I created a suite of internal tools — including Excel analysis and validation tools that streamline how bulk data is checked and processed before it enters the system.

Training & Rollout

Beyond engineering, I deliver the system to its users directly — running presentations and hands-on training sessions, both in person and online, so administrators and teachers can actually adopt what we ship.

Cross-Agency Collaboration — MESOB

As part of a collaboration between AAETQRA and MESOB Ethiopia, I contribute to a broader mission of making citizens’ lives easier. MESOB unifies essential government services — permits, public records, social services — into a single citizen-first digital hub, where people can see required documents, processing times, and fees, and deal with multiple government institutions in one place.